Admission by Jean Hanff Korelitz

Admission is really the story of Portia Nathan, who just happens to work in the admissions office at Princeton. Portia is dealing with the end of a sixteen year relationship and the idea that her mom has taken in a pregnant seventeen-year-old and might end up adopting the baby. She has a breakdown that coincides with these events, but seems to have more to do with a long held secret from her own college years.

I did find the insight into the admissions process of a highly selective college interesting. It must be great to be at a place with need blind admissions. I wonder what percentage of private colleges can still operate that way. Portia spends the fall visiting high schools and encouraging students to apply while the winter is spent wading through thousands of applications to find just the right students.

“It was an oddity of her work that she might know these young men and women so intimately from the records of their accomplishments, their confessed secrets, their worries and ambitions, and yet when the flesh-and-blood applicants arrived on campus a few months later, they were always strangers. Somehow, the folders turned into these bodies: high-spirited, intense, beauteous, or plain, usually clever, but sometimes quite dull. They looked like teenagers walking the campuses of Notre Dame or Texas A&M. They sounded like kids at the mall or on the subway. The special, unique eighteen-year-olds, whose applications had so thrilled Portia and her colleagues, or made them argue passionately for admission over wait list, or wait list over rejection, had somehow morphed into these strangely ordinary beings.”

Admission is a good length to pack for vacation or a long plane trip. It is not a light beach read, but slightly longer and more in depth. It might remind you of your own college admission essays, and give some insight into how the process has changed over the years. The story of Portia, her colleagues, her boyfriend(s), and the potential Princeton admitees is intriguing – slightly too many coincidences to be believable, but still a good read.
Escape to Books

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford

What a great title! This novel, set in Seattle during World War II and 1986, follows Chinese American Henry Lee. Henry is twelve years old in 1942 and has recently had his parents tell him to speak only English. This is difficult as although Henry goes to an all white school on scholarship, his parents only speak Chinese. His father follows the war effort closely and has significant interest in seeing the Japanese defeated in China. He has Henry wear a button that states, “I am Chinese.”

In Seattle at the time Chinatown and Japantown were very close geographically but separate entities, and when a Japanese student, Keiko Okabe, starts at Henry’s school he is unsure what to make of her. They soon become good friends as they are both scholarship students and have to work together at the school. The story revolves around their growing friendship, Henry’s clashes with his dad over this friendship, and the impending internment of Keiko and her family.

I’ve read a few books about the impact of Japanese internment camps on Japanese Americans, including the novel Snow Falling on Cedars and more recently the non-fiction book Stubborn Twig. This novel addresses a few more issues I’ve never considered. There were thousands of Japanese Americans living in Seattle. How were they relocated? What happened to their property and their belongings? The descriptions of the temporary camp at the Puyallup Washington State Fairgrounds and the more permanent one in Minidoka, Idaho seem unreal.

The story of Henry as a young teen during World War II is interspersed with Henry’s life in 1986. He’s now widowed and has a college age son. Henry hears about belongings from World War II found in an old hotel and that starts him on a search to find out what happened to Keiko. I highly recommend this book. It is much more readable than Stubborn Twig and also gives some insight into what other ethnic groups felt about the Japanese relocation and internment.