Acceptance

by Susan Coll

Book Overview

A comic chronicle of a year in the life in the college admissions cycle. It's spring break of junior year and the college admissions hysteria is setting in. "AP" Harry (so named for the unprecedented number of advanced placement courses he has taken) and his mother take a detour from his first choice, Harvard, to visit Yates, a liberal arts school in the Northeast that is enjoying a surge in popularity as a result of a statistical error that landed...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374237190
• ISBN13: 9780374237196
• Release Date: March 2007
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
• Length: 286 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.3" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

For all helicopter parents

As a parent that had recently gone through the college application process with my older child and was starting with the secend, this book was a great read. Though initially "annoyed" or "confused" about what the author found funny about the over achieving students and parents, I realized she was describing me! It made me look at my behavior and laugh at my self. And though that behavior did help get my older son into an ivy (he probably should have read the book), I did lighten up a bit with my other son. I gave this book to an overachieving 18 year old. I don't know if she got it or took notes from the compulsive characters!

A book that turns out to be as good as it sounds

Somewhere in the first quarter of the book, I started to love the three main characters - AP Harry, Maya, and Taylor, who you hope isn't going to slit her wrists because you find yourself pulling for her because she has the same angst that we had growing up and we made it, right? Coll doesn't go for the big laughs with one-liners but rather you end up sustaining a warm-hearted chuckle throughout the entire book. I had to decide between reading this book and a nonfiction book on the same topic, and I'm glad I chose this one because as happens sometimes with fiction, the story ends up feeling even more real than the real thing because we are able to get deeper into the characters' heads.

Hilarious treatment of a timely subject

Susan Coll takes the reader through the maddening, some would say insane, college admissions process through her characters. Parents and students who have applied to colleges recently or will do so soon should read it. Acceptance is a highly entertaining and thoughtful look at this rite of passage for many American young people and their families.

Fantastically funny!

Susan Coll has written a wise comic novel about something that affects all too many of us -- the college admissions process. She is wickedly funny, and really captures the mania that surrounds this yearly craziness. She is a wonderful writer, so her painful, and true, observations, go down with a laugh. A must read.

A much-needed humorous take on a stressful process..a must read!

As the season of thick/thin envelopes is officially upon us, I highly recommend "acceptance" as a way of keeping it all in perspective--especially if you suspect your children are secretly referring to you as a helicopter parent. Coll effectively captures both the children's and adults' points of views (although, as in real life, sometimes the young sound a lot more sane than us "adults"...) in a really compelling, and very, very funny story about the "price of admission." Five stars!