Growing up in my very rural hometown, I was a bored kid reading all these books about gifted students being put into gifted classes, and wishing we had something like that as I went back to my “honors English” class that, as it turned out, was much less rigorous than the regular or remedial English classes. The things you learn when you have to learn how to diagram a sentence in college. But books are amazing things and can transport us through time and space, and show us different experiences so closely we can imagine them being our own. For example, I no longer wish I had been in proximity to gifted classes or clubs or whatever else, all thanks to reading Bruce Holsinger’s The Gifted School.
In the Denver suburbs, Crystal Academy promises a challenging and elite educational experience for the most gifted students throughout the tri-county area, which is a pretty good claim considering there isn’t even yet a completed building to host that experience. For the four families at the heart of The Gifted School, anchored by five bright 11-year-olds, the lack of a building means nothing when it comes to taking every advantage necessary to ensure their kid is among those occupying the building whenever it’s finished. As Rose, whose marriage to sophomore-slumping novelist Gareth has been on the rocks since way before Emma Q was born, says late in the book, “This is the worst person I have ever been.”
And it is, as she misleads one of the school administrators in an attempt to glean a little insider information into the admissions process. But she’s not alone; Beck, whose trust fund, good looks, and charm are all rapidly running out on him, is at risk of a second divorce and alienating both of his twins with his obsession in getting them (or at least one of them) into the elite school, and the elite soccer team. For Samantha, failure to get Emma Z into the school would be like not setting the perfect table or living in a house notable enough for the local historical society to give it a name—preposterous. Everyone knows Lauren’s son, Xavier, is obviously brilliant enough to be a shoo-in to the class—until it becomes apparent that raw intelligence isn’t enough to score a seat at Crystal. Meanwhile, the selective nature of the process and their parents’ obsession with getting them in rubs off on the kids, leaving no one their best self.
At times, reading about what the worst versions of everyone’s respective selves can be tough. Rose, who is successful and driven and on the cusp of success, not to mention seems about the most grounded of the parents, is hard to see fall from such basically-has-it-together heights. Beck’s self-sabotage started well before the start of the book, and seeing him dig his own grave—financially, familially—is a curious blend of pain and satisfaction; the lengths some people will go to in order to avoid growing as a person. The goings-on in Samantha’s household is mainly told through Emma Z’s point of view, which is probably because readers would find it too satisfying to see snobby Samantha struggle.
But the narrative branches out from the obvious characters—with mixed results. Xavier’s older sister, Tessa, is nearing the end of high school not entirely unscathed after a nervous breakdown that led to a drug habit, for which she went to rehab. It’s for her rehab group that she posts vlogs, and some of those vlogs air secrets or other grievances that give the reader a sense of dramatic irony. They also serve to show the pain of being the forgotten and formerly bright kid outshined by a younger sibling, and how that can metamorphize into destructive tendencies. There’s also periodic chapters from the point of view of the Peruvian immigrant family that cleans Samantha and Rose’s houses, whose child is also vying for a spot at Crystal. These chapters show the brilliance outside of the four-family bubble, as well as the latent racism and xenophobia simmering beneath the surface of some corners of this community’s polite society. Aside from that, they do little to drive the narrative, and even in a crucial moment near the end, which illustrates part of one person’s becoming the worst version of themselves, all is well with little disruption on the part of our core families (other than their own awfulness).
While I’m glad this little fictional immigrant boy has a lifechanging opportunity, having the person responsible for dropping the ball making up for that failure would have done more for showing shame and regret more than the sheepish admissions afterward. In the end, some children go to a flashy new school and others stay at a very good private school; a marriage is broken up; one person gets actual character growth; and overall the adults have to sit with their actions but have to face very few other consequences.
Maybe that’s how it should be. After all, this is a book about disproportionate freak-outs over where children go to school when the worst of all possible options is still far better than most people have access to. We’ve seen far more drastic and public bad behavior for the same thing getting the criminal effect of a slap on the wrist. The parents in The Gifted School are not heroes, but perhaps they’re only meant to be uncomfortably relatable: that in wanting the slightly better, we are all too prone to throwing all the rules out the window.
Ring Reads 