Scan barcode
bfraynt's review
5.0
Irena is my cousin, so I have known what an amazing storyteller she is for most of my life. I am so excited that she has now shared this talent with so many others. The Golden Ticket contributes to an important societal conversation about college, parenting, and the systems that are deeply harming our teens and young adults. Irena makes the case that the pressure for affluent families to send their children to highly rejective colleges not only contributes to growing inequality, but creates tremendous suffering for the kids being pushed through this process. And she does it in a funny, poignant, and incredibly brave way. I could not recommend this book more highly.
irena_smith's review
challenging
emotional
funny
hopeful
fast-paced
5.0
Brilliant, acerbic, and deeply affecting, The Golden Ticket is set in the shadow of Stanford University, where Irena Smith—Soviet émigré, PhD in comparative literature, obsessive reader, former Stanford admissions officer, and mother to three children—works as a private admissions counselor to some of the most accomplished, ambitious, and tightly wound students in the country and across the world.
In sometimes straightforward and sometimes oblique responses to college essay prompts (with flagrant disregard for word count restrictions), Irena lays bare the striving, the angst, and the absurdity surrounding highly selective—or, more accurately, highly rejective—college admissions, parenting in Palo Alto, and what we really mean when we say we want the best for our children. Evoking David Sedaris (if David Sedaris were a short, aggrieved, middle-aged woman with occasional delusions of grandeur and an encyclopedic knowledge of Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, The Brady Bunch, and Gilligan's Island), this memoir pulls back the curtain on what happens when aspiration meets reality—and redefines what it means to succeed.
If you like dignified, earnest memoirs by people who have Accomplished Great Things, this is not a book for you. But if you're into snark, soul-searching, great and not-so-great literature, long, loopy tangents, extravagant overuse of parenthetical clauses, and surprisingly entertaining footnotes—well, then you're in the right place.
(And yes, okay, I wrote it, but trust me: it's really good.)
In sometimes straightforward and sometimes oblique responses to college essay prompts (with flagrant disregard for word count restrictions), Irena lays bare the striving, the angst, and the absurdity surrounding highly selective—or, more accurately, highly rejective—college admissions, parenting in Palo Alto, and what we really mean when we say we want the best for our children. Evoking David Sedaris (if David Sedaris were a short, aggrieved, middle-aged woman with occasional delusions of grandeur and an encyclopedic knowledge of Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, The Brady Bunch, and Gilligan's Island), this memoir pulls back the curtain on what happens when aspiration meets reality—and redefines what it means to succeed.
If you like dignified, earnest memoirs by people who have Accomplished Great Things, this is not a book for you. But if you're into snark, soul-searching, great and not-so-great literature, long, loopy tangents, extravagant overuse of parenthetical clauses, and surprisingly entertaining footnotes—well, then you're in the right place.
(And yes, okay, I wrote it, but trust me: it's really good.)
More...