Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    The Admissions: A Novel
    Unavailable
    The Admissions: A Novel
    Unavailable
    The Admissions: A Novel
    Audiobook14 hours

    The Admissions: A Novel

    Written by Meg Mitchell Moore

    Narrated by Allyson Ryan

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    The Admissions brilliantly captures the frazzled pressure cooker of modern life as a seemingly perfect family comes undone by a few desperate measures, long-buried secret -and college applications!

    The Hawthorne family has it all. Great jobs, a beautiful house in one of the most affluent areas of Northern California, and three charming kids whose sunny futures are all but assured. And then comes their eldest daughter's senior year of high school . . .

    Firstborn Angela Hawthorne is a straight-A student and star athlete, with extracurricular activities coming out of her ears and a college application that's not going to write itself. She's set her sights on Harvard, her father's alma mater, and like a dog with a chew toy, Angela won't let up until she's basking in crimson-colored glory. Except her class rank as valedictorian is under attack, she's suddenly losing her edge at cross-country, and she can't help but daydream about a cute baseball player. Of course Angela knows the time put into her schoolgirl crush would be better spent coming up with a subject for her English term paper-which, along with her college essay, has a rapidly approaching deadline.

    Angela's mother, Nora, is similarly stretched to the limit, juggling parent-teacher meetings, carpool, and a real estate career where she caters to the mega-rich and super-picky buyers and sellers of the Bay Area. The youngest daughter, second-grader Maya, still can't read; the middle child, Cecily, is no longer the happy-go-lucky kid she once was; and their dad, Gabe, seems oblivious to the mounting pressures at home because a devastating secret of his own might be exposed. A few ill-advised moves put the Hawthorne family on a collision course that's equal parts achingly real and delightfully screwball-and they learn that whatever it cost to get their lucky lives it may cost far more to keep them.

    Sharp, topical, and wildly entertaining, The Admissions shows that if you pull at a loose thread, even the sturdiest lives start to unravel at the seams of high achievement.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateAug 18, 2015
    ISBN9780147520586
    Unavailable
    The Admissions: A Novel
    Author

    Meg Mitchell Moore

    Meg Mitchell Moore worked for several years as a journalist for a variety of publications before turning to fiction. She lives in the beautiful coastal town of Newburyport, Mass., with her husband and their three daughters. Summer Stage is her eighth novel.

    Related to The Admissions

    Related audiobooks

    Coming of Age Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      In The Margins

      May 16, 2021

      Unforgettable is a word that’s overused in children’s book publicity, but I’m using it anyway for TIGER DAUGHTER, by Rebecca Lim (Allen & Unwin, $18.99), an accessible gem of a book about an empowering friendship that transforms the lives of both its

      2 min read

    • Article

      3 Wonderful Middle-grade Novels For Fall

      Nov 5, 2018

      Intriguing protagonists, lively cultural mixes, and sensitive writing make these books winners.

      3 min read

    • Article

      I’ve Taught Monsters

      May 8, 2017

      I’ve Taught Monsters
      11 min read

    • Article

      House Of Secrets

      Aug 15, 2021

      In THE HOUSE UPTOWN, by Melissa Ginsburg (Faber & Faber, $32.99), 14-year-old Ava leaves Iowa to travel across the country to New Orleans. Her mother has died, her father has never been in her life. She is to live with her grandmother, Lane, an artis

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Joy Of Books

      Nov 24, 2023

      BY JEFF KINNEY Puffin Jeff Kinney’s bestselling books hardly need any introduction – and with the series in its 18th instalment, kids’ enthusiasm for reading about the adventures of Greg Heffley shows no sign of waning. For children who haven’t yet

      3 min read

    • Article

      Hello, Hardbacks

      Jan 18, 2022

      Hello, Hardbacks
      1 min read

    • Article

      Ruthless Innocence

      Jul 8, 2022

      Ruthless Innocence
      3 min read

    • Article

      ‘The Guncle’ Proves That Families Come In All Different Shapes

      May 24, 2021

      Following their mother’s death, two children spend the summer with “Gay Uncle Patrick” in this heartfelt and entertaining novel by Steven Rowley.

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Great Exam Failure

      Mar 6, 2024

      Whenever my daughters say, ‘I was sat’ (which is frequently), I ask them who exactly plonked them there. I am becoming a dreary, Canute-like pedant, fighting a long-lost battle, given there is hardly a broadcaster on Radio 4 who seems to know the dif

      3 min read

    • Article

      I Know How Hard This Is

      May 8, 2020

      I Know How Hard This Is
      4 min read

    • Article

      You Live And LEARN

      Jun 5, 2022

      Though I may use the occasional long word, I’m not a particularly well-educated person. I didn’t enjoy school and couldn’t wait to leave and join the rest of the world. At the time, I didn’t appreciate the need to know more, but I’ve learned quite a

      2 min read

    • Article

      With All The Distractions At Home, Low-income Students Need Headphones To Study

      Mar 30, 2020

      LOS ANGELES - In her family's one-bedroom home every day unfolds with one distraction after another for 17-year-old Anais Hernandez: her mother cooking and cleaning in the kitchen; her disabled father watching high-volume TV news; the bustle of her y

      3 min read

    • Article

      Class Warfare

      Feb 20, 2022

      Class Warfare
      2 min read

    • Article

      'Curlfriends: New In Town' Reminds Us That There Can Be Positives Of Middle School

      Oct 13, 2023

      The first volume in author-artist Sharee Miller's debut YA graphic novel series reminds us of the many possibilities and excitements interwoven within the challenging years of early teenagerhood.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Those Who Can, Teach By Andria Zafirakou Review: Inspiring Children And Going ‘Above And Beyond’

      Apr 7, 2021

      The title of this book is a twist on the old gag: those who can, do; those who can’t, teach. But if you take out the comma and put some dots on the end, you get to the gist of this book: those who can teach... have something to teach the rest of us

      4 min read

    • Article

      Off The Shelf

      Aug 4, 2021

      What if we could speak to the dead? It would be a rare person processing the loss of a loved one who hadn’t wished they could pick up the phone and have one last conversation. The Emporium of the Imagination is inspired by the true story of the wind

      5 min read

    • Article

      How To Make Yourself Heard

      Mar 18, 2024

      by Sarah Marsh (Tinder Press, $37.99) It’s the fast-changing world of Boston and London in the 1870s, a time of invention and industrialisation. Our heroine, Ellen Lark, is a bright young woman who became deaf at the age of four after scarlet fever.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Educating Lillian

      Mar 5, 2018

      I grew up in the valley of that mountain, just poor enough that I could imagine a way out. I lived with my mom and a rotating cast of her boyfriends, my father either dead or just checked out. My mother was so vague about him, not a single picture. I

      1 min read

    • Article

      I Hate Kevin From Motherland – Mainly Because He Reminds Me Of Myself

      Jun 1, 2021

      Sharon Horgan’s comedy Motherland is back for a third series, which means a return for my least favourite parent on TV, Kevin. Played brilliantly by Paul Ready, Kevin is the male ambassador to Motherland’s mostly female schoolmate kingdom. He is a si

      4 min read

    Reviews for The Admissions

    4/5

    62 ratings7 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 2/5
      I could not resist borrowing the audio book when I saw it with all the hypes going on. I think I set my expectation for this book way too high. The title was a little misleading. Yes, the oldest daughter is going through the college admission process but the book is about the entire family.
    • 4/5
      Excellent book. Family with tons of drama. Like the stuff about college
    • 5/5
      This book grabbed me and never let go. It is not that my life is like the Hawthornes, a high-flying couple with money who have given their three daughters every advantage in life. It is not that I have a child who is in the process of applying for college with the expectation that she get into Harvard. Not even close. But I do know what it is like to feel anxious and frightened about what the future will hold for her in this time of uber competition, fragmented work and instability. There are decisions that I have probably made based on these fears that have been misguided. And that is the power of the book. This family is so human, so flawed, so full of fear and love that I was immediately drawn into to their story. Each character was complex and it was easy to feel empathy for them as they slowly, but surely, began to fall apart from the demands that they thought they must meet and the secrets that they kept from each other, The daughter, Angela was especially well-drawn as she struggles to meet expectations yet retain some sense of self and her mother, a real estate agent, who is able to see how these expectations hurt her daughter but unable to see how having to be the top dog real estate agent is just as destructive is likable, funny and at times maddening. I cannot recommend highly enough this fast paced, sometimes funny, sometimes wrenching and thrilling ("what will happen next!?") book.Thank you to Edelweiss for allowing me to review this book for an honest opinion.
    • 4/5
      My two oldest children are only a year apart in school. If I thought it was hard having them close in age as babies, I never even thought about the potential difficulties once they were high schoolers. And yet because doing the college application thing was so much fun last year, we're thrilled to get to do it all over again this year. (Terrible how sarcasm doesn't register very well in writing.) As you might suspect, the college search and application process is not fun in any way, shape, or form. So you could be forgiven for wondering why I'd choose to read a book about a family going through that very same thing. Meg Mitchell Moore's novel, The Admissions, won't help calm any fears you have about the process; in fact, it might amp them up a bit, but it's a fantastic and terrifying representation of a high achieving high school senior, her driven parents, and the younger siblings whose issues are overlooked as they take a backseat to the all important application.The Hawthorne family looks like they have everything they could ever want. Father Gabe is a partner in a management consulting firm. Mother Nora is a very successful real estate agent in pricey Marin County. Oldest daughter Angela is her class' valedictorian and a phenomenal cross country runner. Middle child Cecily is passionate about Irish dancing. And baby of the family Maya is a pretty happy go lucky second grader. But life isn't everything it seems on the surface and as Angela applies to Harvard, the dream school she's been groomed for since toddlerhood, the cracks in the picture of perfection start to widen. Gabe has a secret at work that the company's newest intern, a predatory piece of work, threatens to expose. Worse, it's a secret he's kept even from Nora. Nora is completely overwhelmed with her job and the girls. A very important listing is about to expire and be pulled from her, she could be held accountable for something that was never disclosed on a multi-million dollar home she sold several years ago, and she's convinced that an accident that happened on her watch, an accident she never told Gabe about, could be the reason that Maya can't read yet. Angela is desperate to hold onto her number one class ranking, stooping to means she'd once never have considered and she can't even begin to imagine what will happen if she doesn't get into Harvard early admission. Cecily's dancing is suddenly slightly off and she's dwelling on some pretty morbid stuff for an elementary school kid. And of course, Maya can't read.None of the characters have shared their burdens with the others, giving the novel an ever increasing sense of secrets kept, intentional omissions, and little white lies all of which threaten to destroy the characters and this life they've built. Despite the reader knowing or guessing all of the secrets, still the rising tide of guilt and poor decisions slowly and inexorably strangles the reader as the pages turn. Moore has really captured the panic and nausea, the stress and pressure of applying to college. Your heart can't help but go out to the over-achieving Angela who is so focused on the things that she thinks will make her application stand out that she has no time to enjoy herself or be a kid. Everything in her life has to be a means to an end and she can't afford to slip, ever. Every member of this family can feel the tension and stress filling their home with increasing desperation. And that's no way to live. Too wrapped up in their own personal dramas to admit to each other the difficulties they are facing, the terrible choices they've made, or the real future they want, it is still clear that these characters do care for each other and care deeply. Moore's creative use of SAT words throughout Angela's narrative sections helps highlight the way that everything about the college application process and the pressure to perform and know everything pervades the high school senior's entire life. Gabe's fears at work and Nora's out of kilter work home life balance serve to make them incredibly sympathetic and realistic. The story alternates perspectives between all of the Hawthornes except Maya, giving the reader a complete picture of the family that the characters themselves don't have. This makes the difficulties each character faces that much more poignant to a reader who can possibly relate to the underlying motivations of each. The narrative pacing is taut and increases consistently until the end when everything unravels, as it must. After the tension of the bulk of the book, the ending is a bit easy but it is a hopeful antidote to the stress that precedes it. A thoroughly enjoyable cautionary tale about self-imposed pressures consuming us, stealing our joy in life, and making us willing to deviate from who we know ourselves to be (or to not even have the chance to find out who we are), this will make you re-evaluate your life, your goals, and the expectations you place not only on yourself but on those you love.
    • 5/5
      A modern family with three young girls copes with the pressures of college apps, peer pressure, and jobs. I loved the writing and felt like I was part of the family from the start. I will read more by this author.
    • 3/5
      5195563Pgchuis's review Sep 25, 15 · edit3 of 5 starsRead from September 11 to 25, 2015** spoiler alert ** Gabe, a management consultant, and his wife, Nora, a realtor, have three daughters. The eldest, Angela is applying to Harvard, where Gabe studied, but is increasingly overwhelmed by all the extracurricular activities she has to cram in, on top of her academic work. Cecily, the easy middle daughter, is a keen Irish dancer, but stumbles at a competition and lets her group down. The youngest, Maya, is 7, but unable to read, something for which Nora blames herself, since Maya rolled off a bed when she was a baby and landed on her head. Nora has never told Gabe about this. Gabe has never told Nora that he did not in fact go to Harvard at all. Angela tells no one that she has resorted to stealing pills from a boy she babysits for to help her study and has stolen an essay intending to submit it as her own project. Nora makes a mistake at work and is fired, but delays telling Gabe. And so it goes on. I started off enjoying this, but skimmed the last 40% as it all got a bit much. Nora's abortive midnight raid on the protected plant was a low point too far for me. I struggled also to understand quite how busy Nora was, given that she had a husband and a baby-sitter and presumably could pick her own hour in exchange for all those weekend open houses. Gabe did seem pretty absent from home life for much of the novel and Nora, while we were told she was an excellent realtor, never seemed to focus on much. I couldn't quite work Nora out actually; at times she seemed to realize that it didn't matter if Angela got into Harvard or not, but then she was always pushing extra activities on the girls to which she had no time to take them. No one seemed to feel it was Gabe's role to have even an opinion about all this. The tone was also uneven; mostly it was funny, but then Gabe's situation and need to admit to his past was serious and the lecture the Harvard admissions officer gives Angela about how her whole generation thinks they're special was a bit preachy.I'm glad Abby got her comeuppance at the end, but otherwise the ending was all a bit over the top happy for me.
    • 4/5
      One little comment can change your life. Nora and Gabe has the perfect family...but looks can be deceiving. As the parent of a HS senior, I found this book interesting and truthful about the pressures some of our kids are facing. But, apples don't fall far from the tree!