I could not tear myself away from listening to this book and as a result, made significant progress on a tough jigsaw puzzle I was working on. I had been thinking about this Charlottesville author since his recent book was tapped by Oprah and then learned that Jennifer was reading this one. While I was always conscious of its shortcomings, it did capture me.
It is the story of four complicated families and their reactions to the prospect of a magnet gifted school being built to serve students in their area. It is set on the Front Range in Colorado in a prosperous small town. Having lived in Denver for nine months, I think fondly of this area, so different from Virginia where I grew up and where I’ve lived for the last 40-some years, beautiful in its own way. Before I leave the personal connections portion of this post, I will say the author is a UVa professor and his bio mentions Hildegard of Bingen and Chaucer and I believe he lives in my neighborhood.
The four families are united by the friendship of the four women and we slowly learn about their husbands and children and their long-time connections. They all make terrible and sometimes unthinkable choices to get their children into the magnet school and the author uses this to explore the unpleasant aspect of parents living vicariously through their kids. And the author touches on the matter of whether a magnet school or any gifted program is necessarily discriminatory and problematic for those not chosen. I must cite Dean Strong, a school board member from long ago in my work life who was attentive to the needs of students in the middle, but also espoused the importance of meeting the needs of all students, whatever their level, very high or very low.
These parents were stunning in their bad choices, but the most inexplicable was the very successful scientist in academia, whose career and the lab she ran were affected by her lies aimed at improving her daughter’s chance of being accepted at the new school. But then there was the moment when Beck’s bad choices converged during a soccer game. Beck (one of the fathers) learned via text messages while on the sidelines that his fourth credit card was denied, his son got a red card for very bad behavior, and he yelled at and pushed a woman. His observation about buzzards circling, “descending on the corpse of whatever beast had been lucky enough to die in the middle of that wide, dry plain,” seemed a gratuitous message about how bad things were.
While the parents’ and kids’ actions had significant consequences, the book successfully managed to end on a positive note, with all the characters being chastened and focused with a new understanding of what is important.
Bruce Holsinger, The Gifted School, Riverhead Books, 2020, 550 pages (I listened to the audiobook). Available in the public library.