I had always preferred the boarding school setting of Little Men to the original Little Women. Fourteen years of New Jersey friendships be damned.Įverything I’d read and heard about boarding school reinforced this. It seemed obvious to me that friendships made at boarding school would be the most intense, magical, meaningful, and, most important, solid friendships of my lifetime. With its combination of incisive social critique and uproarious depictions of elite nonsense, ADMISSIONS will resonate with anyone who has ever been The Only One in a room, dealt with racial microaggressions, or even just suffered from an extreme case of homesickness.Over the course of my childhood, I read hundreds of pages on the boarding school experience-and they hadn’t even all been Harry Potter, though the friendship that Harry, Ron, and Hermione cemented during their first year studying the magical arts at Hogwarts wasn’t too far off from what I was expecting from my own boarding school life.

Through these stories, some troubling, others hilarious, she deconstructs the lies and half-truths she herself would later tell as an admissions professional, in addition to the myths about boarding schools perpetuated by popular culture. In ADMISSIONS, Kendra looks back at the three years she spent at Taft, chronicling clashes with her lily-white roommate, how she had to unlearn the respectability politics she'd been raised with, and the fall-out from a horrifying article in the student newspaper that accused Black and Latinx students of being responsible for segregation of campus. Her new job forced her to reflect on her own elite education experience, and to realize how disillusioned she had become with America's inequitable system. As an admissions officer specializing in diversity recruitment for independent prep schools, she persuaded students and families to embark on the same perilous journey she herself had made-to attend cutthroat and largely white schools similar to The Taft School, where she had been the first African-American legacy student only a few years earlier. The best depiction of elite whiteness I've read.'- New York TimesĮarly on in Kendra James' professional life, she began to feel like she was selling a lie. The work of Admissions is laying down, with wit and care, the burden James assumed at 15, that she - or any Black student, or all Black students - would manage the failures of a racially illiterate community.

NAMED A BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF 2022 BY ESQUIRE

Kendra james taft