Admission / Jean Hanff Korelitz

A patron recommended this title to me the other day in the library and I thought it sounded really interesting. After having gone through the agony and the ecstasy of the college admissions process last year with our one and only child, I am still tuned in to the admissions cycle and have even been lurking in online college admissions forums to shadow students who are agonizing over their choices for college and university, and ultimately the choices that the college and universities make when considering their apps. It was just such a monumental process that it’s hard to turn it off. Maybe this book will serve as part of my therapy.

I also saw the movie based on Admission starring Tina Fey, and while it was billed as a comedy (which the book most certainly is not), it was only mildly entertaining. The book, as frequently is the case, is not like the movie. The author provides wonderful insight into the highly competitive admissions process and gives it a human face in the character of Portia Nathan, an admissions officer who takes great pride in her role as gatekeeper to Princeton, until there is a seismic shift in her personal life and things take a calamitous turn.

I loved the student application essay excerpts that started each chapter, and the wonderful discussions about fairness and tradition in selecting an incoming class for an ivy league school. I thought the characters were wonderful and the book reminded me a bit of The Marriage Plot in terms of its characters and setting. Sure, the narrative had more than a few unlikely happenstance connections, but I really enjoyed it and will miss “visiting” with Portia and John and all the other characters I’ve come to know these past few days.

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Here we are / Graham Swift

This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.

Addie Pray / Joe David Brown (more recently published as Paper Moon ) Click here to check for availability at AFPLS This 1971 novel was the inspiration for the Peter Bogdanovich movie Paper Moon . Eleven-year-old Addie and her maybe-father “Long Boy” Moses Pray crisscross the Deep South “ramifying” (scamming) people during the Great Depression. Addie’s street smarts and perceived girlish innocence, along with Long Boy’s cleverness and shrewd business acumen build their operation until they are dealing in millions. The movie remained pretty true to the first half of the book (though it moved the location from Alabama to Kansas), but the adventures continue far beyond where the movie left off. The decades haven’t dimmed the magic of this rollicking adventure, either in the film or the book. ©Ken Vesey, 17 June 2010

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie / Alan Bradley

Pippi Longstocking meets Miss Marple in the character of precocious 11-year-old Flavia de Luce, the youngest of three daughters in a once well-to-do family in early 1950s rural England. This first mystery in an intended series finds Flavia beating the local police inspector at his own game in solving the mystery surrounding the murder of an old school mate of her father's in their back garden (in the cucumber patch no less). Clues include a bird indigenous to Norway, a rare stamp, and a bit of flaky pie crust. This nostalgic and innocent whodunnit will have you at the edge of your seat by its suspenseful climax. I can see BBC/PBS picking up on the popularity of this charming mystery. The second in the series has already been published and the third is soon to follow. And by the way, here's a great library quote from Flavia on page 50: "... it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No

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