Through the memoir, James critically explores her role as an admissions officer engaged in diversity recruitment for schools like Taft-while offering young people and their families hope for social mobility-as she sheds light on the at-times humorous, at-times absurd, and often gut wrenching experience of integrating an elite educational institution. Reflecting on her experience as the first Black legacy admit to the prestigious Taft School in Connecticut, Kendra James offers a searing look at race in private schools. Kendra James, Admissions: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School Roopika Risam Higher Education Section Editor Even while she herself continued to be 45 for many years. If the novel isn’t perfect, except in being too short, it is still a welcome reminder that even in the twenty-first century, Spark went on taking delight in her changing world precisely because it was changing.

More surprising are characters caught surreptitiously reading files on others’ computers and emails dropped into the text. The publisher arrived the following week, tall, thin, well over forty and at the same time well under fifty, and in fact she would have been, and would be forty-five for many years.

It is as full, as ever, of those vinegar-dipped Spark sentences: Set in a Swiss boarding school, it’s about a semi-successful writing teacher devoured by murderous jealousy towards a student on the verge of publishing a successful novel about Mary Queen of Scots. So when The Finishing School popped up on my library audiobook app, I hit download right away. What I never expected to discover was a Spark novel from 2004. Loving the brilliant midlife books that followed- The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Girls of Slender Means, and The Hothouse by the East River-I’ve always intended to go back and read it. Muriel Spark published her first novel, The Comforters in 1957 she was already 39.

But when the workday is done, what is actually on our nightstands? Here we bring you, in our own words, a behind-the-scenes look at what we have been reading this month. At Public Books, our editorial staff and contributors are hard at work to provide readers with thought-provoking articles.

Kendra james taft