Admissions A memoir of surviving boarding school

Review by Booklist Review

Thanks to popular culture, two frameworks come to mind when one thinks about boarding school and its pupils. There's the glamorous and wealthy elite à la Gossip Girl or the rebellious teen shipped off to shape up as seen on Maury. James smashes those preconceived notions by sharing her experiences as the first African American legacy to graduate from the prestigious Taft School in Connecticut. As an adult, James worked in diversity recruitment for admissions offices to other prominent, independent boarding schools. James' career forced her to remove the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia and look back on her time at Taft with a critical lens. She recounts anecdotes, some comical and some disturbing, about the predominately white student body and faculty. James deals with microaggressions, dismantling respectability politics, blatant racism in a school newspaper editorial, and growing up as a teen in the early aughts. James' social commentary and sparkling wit shine throughout this absorbing and insightful coming-of-age memoir. Recommended for readers interested in a peek behind the curtain of private-school education.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this scintillating debut, former Shondaland editor James intertwines her own coming-of-age story with a searing indictment of elite academia. "To be Black in a New England boarding school," she writes, "is to be touted for your statistical presence... and ignored everywhere else." The first Black American legacy to graduate from Taft School in 2006, James recounts her rude awakening when the "freedom and independence" she was promised as a student turned out to be the opposite. Taft, she recalls, was a school both uniquely attuned to and openly hostile to her development and that of other "expert, if involuntary, pioneers" who were forced to navigate the constraints of an institution that catered to its "white majority." Notably, she recalls an unfounded accusation of theft by a classmate, that--after being threatened with police intervention--James was pressured to confess to. Despite the challenges she faced, James reflects on the paradoxical sense of safety she felt as a "Talented-Tenth-respectability-obsessed-snob" and how, after graduating, she worked as an independent school admissions counselor peddling the "myths of American upward mobility" to low-income families, before finally confronting her trauma and speaking out about the pervasive racism in boarding schools. The result is an eye-opening examination of race, class, and privilege in America. Agent: Jane von Mehren, Aevitas Creative Management. (Jan.)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A founding editor of Shondaland.com recounts her experiences as a student at an elite boarding school and, later, as an admissions officer specializing in diversity recruitment. When James enrolled at the prestigious Taft School, she had no idea that, as Taft's first "Black American legacy student to graduate since 1891," she would become the school's poster child for diversity. The beautiful campus seemed to promise madcap Harry Potter--style adventures, but James soon realized that the majority-White school was really a "swamp of microaggressions" that threatened to engulf her at every turn. During her first year, a White student not only accused an innocent James of stealing $20 from her room, but also threatened to call her uncle, who was a police officer. The author also observed unequal treatment of her peers. Where two students of color were expelled for copying from each other, a White male student who had plagiarized work was punished by being sent to the school's Learning Center. Taft aggressively "preached diversity and inclusion and yet took money from [former Fox News CEO] Roger Ailes." When a White student wrote an article in the school newspaper that students of color were the true racists for being "unfriendly, intimidating and granted too much special treatment," the school did nothing. Committed to diversity, James became a private school recruiter. Within a short time, however, she realized that her efforts to help other students of color amounted to selling "a lie for a living." The author has a unique and timely story to tell, but her recollections of her years at Taft are detailed to a fault. The result is an often rambling narrative that, in (over-)recounting the minutiae of her everyday experiences, often drifts away from the pertinent race issues that are at the heart of her story. A well-intentioned but overdone memoir in need of streamlining. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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