Getting In Book

Q: What does a parent need to survive the college application process?

A. A sense of humor.
B. A therapist on 24-hour call.
C. A large bank balance.
D. All of the above.

Getting In is the roller-coaster story of five very different Los Angeles families united by a single obsession: acceptance at a top college, preferably one that makes their friends and neighbors green with envy. At an elite private school and a nearby public school, families devote themselves to getting their seniors into the perfect school-even if the odds are stacked against them, even if they can't afford the $50,000 annual price tag, even if the effort requires a level of deceit, and even if the object of all this attention wants to go somewhere else.

Getting In is a delightfully smart comedy of class and entitlement, of love and ambition, set in a world where a fat envelope from a top school matters more than anything . . . almost.

Karen Stabiner is the author of eight books, a regular contributor to The Huffington Post and the Los Angeles Times Opinion section, and an adjunct professor at the Columbia University School of Journalism. Her daughter left for college in the fall of 2007.

Publishers Weekly

Stabiner (The Empty Nest), known for her books on parenting, has written a novel about five families with children applying to college that’s as arduous and tedious as the actual application process. The Harvard legacy fourth-generation child who secretly wants to be an architect and ditch applying to the top school, the girl whose B+ has damned her to look just below the Ivies, and the financially struggling immigrants’ daughter with a perfect SAT score whose sights are set on Harvard and nowhere else are among the teens and their overzealous parents fully focused on the prize or confused about their future in Stabiner’s stuffy and boring study. There is no real desire to care for these characters and too much time spent setting the scene, thereby blurring the focus of the story. Getting into college may have its challenges, but reading this book is one test best left undone. (Mar.)