Early Decision

an Ecken und Kanten leicht bestoßen, schwarzer Filzstiftstrich am unteren Schnitt, insgesamt guter Zustand

“...part Gossip Girl, part Dead Poets Society”

In the decades before she was able to tell her own story, Lacy Crawford (author of Notes on a Silencing) worked with high school seniors trying to learn to tell theirs in the 15 years she spent as a highly sought-after private college counselor. The college essay could be a terribly nerve-wracking assignment—or, as Crawford saw it, an opportunity for a young person to set their sights on a future of their own—as Crawford illuminates in her debut novel Early Decision.

Working one-on-one with helicopter parents and burned-out kids, Anne “the application whisperer” can make Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford a reality—assuming, of course, that’s what a student wants. Early Decision follows five students over one autumn as Anne helps them craft their essays, cram for the SATs, and perfect the Common Application, though their larger task might be balancing their parents’ hopes against their own developing dreams.

It seems their entire future is on the line—and it is. Though not because of the Ivy League. It’s because the process, warped as it is by money, connections, competition, and parental mania, threatens to crush their independence just as adulthood begins.

With wit and heart, Early Decision sends up the secrets of the college admissions race and celebrates the adolescents forced to run its gauntlet.

college admissions, admissions process