The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association

[conuly]

Well... if you're interested in reading a book about how living in an over-privileged Connecticut town is terrible and nobody should ever do it (especially if that's going to intersect badly with their terrible childhood) then this is a book you'll like. I preferred Dreadful - the realism : magic ratio in this book leaned a little too realistic, also, I just do not believe that the only school choices are a. fancy schools for wealthy overachievers that have massively high standards and high stakes testing b. xenophobic schools with very low standards and c. homeschooling. Even if there are no public school options there still have to be artsy fartsy schools for wealthy people who know that their kids cannot do the pressure cooker thing starting in kindy.

Comments

[maju]

This cuts a little too close to the bone. My daughter lives in one of those Connecticut towns. Her kids go to public school though.

[conuly]

Well, I’m sure neither you nor your parents were as aggressively terrible as the protagonists estranged parents seem to have been.

[conuly]

So there’s that!

[landofnowhere]

Thanks for the review! Between it and reading the first few pages I've decided that it's not the sort of thing I'd enjoy. (My partner's sister lives in one of those towns, and her kids' school experience didn't sound that awful.)

[conuly]

Yeah, it's one of those things where, when you're in it it feels like everybody else is doing the college admissions counselors and the five travel teams and the seven additional extracurriculars and the dozen and a half tutors - but honestly, there are always options, even in those towns.

[adrian_turtle]

I really liked it as a take on the limited options for a kid with disabilities. Because if the kid has an unusual disability? Not as unusual as lycanthropy or shapechanging, but unusual and harder to deal with than needing a wheelchair or audiobooks.) Most schools cannot cope. Or they don't want to cope, which comes to the same thing. Private schools say gently that they don't think the child is a good fit for their community, or that they wish they had more resources but they think the child's needs would be better served elsewhere.

Public schools don't try to teach the kid whatever the local version of Regents classes might be, much less college prep. They are legally required to accommodate disabled kids and provide an appropriate education, but that doesn't mean they actually do. (I would actually love to see a book about a family that took the other path and sued the school district for not accommodating their child's lycanthropy. Though a teen with vampirism would be funnier.) I know families that move to a different school district where the public schools have better disability accommodations, and those schools are oversupplied with wealthy overachievers and parents who care passionately about ETS and college admissions tests.

[conuly]

It's a toxic mix, though - too many of those overachievers and the entire school environment goes bad.

[bibliofile]

Sounds like the author grew up in one of those places and has little to no experience of anything else.

Hmm, from Cherry Hill NJ and went to Princeton, so that potentially tracks. Worked/s in marketing, which is not likely to expose one to other, less privileged contexts. Author is over forty now though and, one hopes, would know better by now.

(This was my growing up too, though I have since gotten out more.)

[conuly]

Given how critical the book is of the setting and the people who actively make it worse, and the protagonist's tragic backstory of having been raised in that environment, escaped, and then been dragged back because her daughter suddenly got turned into a werewolf and this was the only school that they got a scholarship to, I think that she does know that it's a shitty environment. (I mean, the protagonist eventually realizes she accidentally got co-opted by the two worst people in the PTA and manages to pivot to a significantly less terrible friend group, but it's not like anybody is doing anything to fix the issues that led to the issues of this book.)

[bibliofile]

Well that's something, at least.

I was more criticizing the limited portrayal of the only other options (schools with very low standards and homeschooling). There's a huge middle ground that's just missing. And that particular framing of options is endemic in my former overprivileged world.

[bibliofile]

(I also realize that this says at least as much about me as it does about the author, whom I don't know and haven't met. LOL)

[conuly]

Yeah, the kindest interpretation here is that they're getting their information from a particular source who really really prefers for them to stay close by, for her own reasons (and who certainly has her own biases), and they aren't really in a position to do a lot of independent research on this topic.