Girls with Bright Futures
Fiction
Sourcebooks Landmark
February 2, 2021
Paperback
416
Purchased
College admissions season at Seattle's Elliott Bay Academy is marked by glowing acceptances from top-tier institutions and students as impressive as their parents are ambitious. But when Stanford alerts the school it's allotting only one spot to EBA for their incoming class, three mothers discover the competition is more cut-throat than they could have imagined.
Tech giant Alicia turns to her fortune and status to fight for her reluctant daughter's place at the top. Kelly, a Stanford alum, leverages her PTA influence and insider knowledge to bulldoze the path for her high-strung daughter. And Maren makes three: single, broke, and ill-equipped to battle the elite school community aligning to bring her superstar daughter down.
That's when, days before applications are due, one of the girls suffers a near-fatal accident, one that doesn't appear to be an accident at all.
As the community spirals out of control, three women will have to decide what lines they're willing to cross to secure their daughters' futures...and keep buried the secrets that threaten to destroy far more than just college dreams.
My review:
With the recent headline news about the college admissions scandals surrounding some wealthy families, this novel couldn't be more appropriate. This story follows the families of students who attend a fictitious private academy high school in Seattle. While several families are mentioned in passing, the book is mostly focused on three families whose daughters all have high hopes of attending Stanford. When it is revealed that only one spot remains open for the academy's students, you can imagine what ensues with these cutthroat parents! Throughout the novel, we focus on just how far they will go to get their daughter the coveted spot. Really fast paced, told in alternating voices of the girls mothers, this one will keep you enthralled with all the antics, and ultimate consequences of those actions. My favorite part of the story was how it was the mothers of two of the girls who were constantly pushing perfection, their daughters were just the casualties of helicopter parenting to the extreme! While I understand why it tied into the plot, I did feel that one of the extraneous storylines for Winnie was a bit random, and really took me away from the overall scheme. However, this one was a roller coaster ride, and while I'm not always a fan of tidy epilogues, I absolutely needed this one!
Set yourself a good chunk of time for this one, because once you start reading about these crazy people, you won't want to stop until you find out who got into which schools!
