First half of the book felt like “coming of age” biography. Honestly I was expecting so much more from this book. The whole book is pretty much about her experiences during the three years she studied there. Kendra (his daughter) is a legacy student attending the same school. It’s about an adolescent Black girl who’s father was a graduate of a very elite, predominantly White private school in Connecticut. I really really wanted to love this book.It ended up being an OK book for me in the end.

With its combination of incisive social critique and uproarious depictions of elite nonsense, ADMISSIONS will resonate with anyone who has ever been The Only One in a room, dealt with racial microaggressions, or even just suffered from an extreme case of homesickness. Through these stories, some troubling, others hilarious, she deconstructs the lies and half-truths she herself would later tell as an admissions professional, in addition to the myths about boarding schools perpetuated by popular culture. In ADMISSIONS, Kendra looks back at the three years she spent at Taft, chronicling clashes with her lily-white roommate, how she had to unlearn the respectability politics she'd been raised with, and the fall-out from a horrifying article in the student newspaper that accused Black and Latinx students of being responsible for segregation of campus. Her new job forced her to reflect on her own elite education experience, and to realize how disillusioned she had become with America’s inequitable system. As an admissions officer specializing in diversity recruitment for independent prep schools, she persuaded students and families to embark on the same perilous journey she herself had made-to attend cutthroat and largely white schools similar to The Taft School, where she had been the first African-American legacy student only a few years earlier. Early on in Kendra James’ professional life, she began to feel like she was selling a lie.

Admissions book review kendra james