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

[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.