This dramatic fictional celebrity tell-all is a lesson in privilege, complicity and integrity.
"Nothing bad has ever really happened" to 17-year-old Chloe Berringer. She attends "the best private school in Los Angeles," has been accepted to one of her reach colleges--even though she's in the bottom half of her class--and is attending prom with the boy she's had a years-long crush on. When the FBI shows up at her house, she thinks it's a gag. But it's no joke when her sitcom-starring mom is arrested on "multiple fraud charges in [a] countrywide college admissions scandal." As Chloe sorts out her role in the incident, she loses "everything," including her college acceptance and friends. Now Chloe must come to terms with her guilt and reconcile what's worse: the act or complicity in it.
In the ripped-from-the-headlines Admission, Julie Buxbaum (Hope and Other Punchlines) uses the 2019 Varsity Blues admission scandal to discuss white privilege and white people's complicity. Whether it's Chloe's microaggressions toward her Nigerian American best friend ("Maybe you guys should move to a better school district") or the legal ways Chloe's family has worked the system ("I had tutors and specialists and advisors"), Buxbaum shows how ingrained white privilege is in our society, as well as its effects on Black people. Dual timelines that alternate narration between "Now" and "Then" move the story along quickly and help facilitate a discussion about complicity as readers consider Chloe's role in the events that led up to her mother's arrest. This thought-provoking and compelling story proves being "aggressively oblivious" can no longer be the status quo. --Lana Barnes, freelance reviewer and proofreader