The Gifted School, by Bruce Holsinger
Details
The results are in! The winner of our poll – and the book we will discuss on May 6, 2026 – is The Gifted School, by Bruce Holsinger. We used STAR Voting again this month, and twenty-two members voted in the poll. Of our four book choices, Erasure and The Gifted School received the most stars in the scoring round and advanced to the runoff round. In the runoff round, two people ranked the finalists equally, Erasure received nine votes, and The Gifted School received eleven votes. Thank you to everyone who voted!
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2020 COLORADO BOOK AWARD FOR GENERAL FICTION • INSTANT NATIONAL BEST SELLER
This deliciously sharp novel captures the relentless ambitions and fears that animate parents and their children in modern America, exploring the conflicts between achievement and potential, talent and privilege.
Set in the fictional town of Crystal, Colorado, The Gifted School is a keenly entertaining novel that observes the drama within a community of friends and parents as good intentions and high ambitions collide in a pile-up with long-held secrets and lies. Seen through the lens of four families who’ve been a part of one another’s lives since their kids were born over a decade ago, the story reveals not only the lengths that some adults are willing to go to get ahead, but the effect on the group’s children, sibling relationships, marriages, and careers, as simmering resentments come to a boil and long-buried, explosive secrets surface and detonate. It’s a humorous, keenly observed, timely take on ambitious parents, willful kids, and the pursuit of prestige, no matter the cost. —description from the publisher Penguin Random House
“Addictive, whip-smart, acutely observed and sharply funny, The Gifted School trains its lens on a community where a talented child is a social commodity and asks how far some families might be willing to go in pursuit of status. A delicious read.” —Gilly Macmillan, New York Times-bestselling author of What She Knew
“Wise and addictive… The Gifted School is the juiciest novel I’ve read in ages… a suspenseful, laugh-out-loud page-turner and an incisive inspection of privilege, race and class…. The book goes down as easy as a gin and tonic on a summer day, but the takeaway is damning. In their quest to give their offspring the best, these parents have committed, as one member of the group realizes too late, ‘a collective crime against childhood....’” —J. Courtney Sullivan in The New York Times
“Holsinger renders his helicopter moms and soccer dads so precisely that one understands their motivations, even feels their longing and pride. . . [The Gifted School] exposes how easily a mix of good intentions, self-delusions, and minor sins can escalate into the kind of skullduggery that might prompt an F.B.I. sting.” —The New Yorker
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