The Gifted School is a good vacation read, but if I were grading it, I’d give it at best a solid B. The book summary led me to believe it was going to be something different than it was, but once I adjusted my expectations, I enjoyed it. It certainly does feed into the craziness that can exist around getting little Dunstan into the “right” school.

Maybe it’s reality TV, like the Real Housewives of whatever city, that made me skew my expectations for this book, but I expected it to be more outrageous. Now that I think on it to write the review, though, I’m beginning to think I didn’t appropriately appreciate some of the nuance. The book does an excellent job illustrating how white privilege will glom onto any number of opportunities to show how woke they are, without really understanding the ramifications of their actions.

Bruce Holsinger gives us some deeply flawed characters who use some horrible judgement, and some of them find redemption. He shows us how parents out of synch in how to raise their children can harm their marriage and their families. He reminds us again, that on the Internet, nothing is private.

As I read this book, I was disappointed that it didn’t meet my original expectations, but thinking about it here, there are more messages to be gleaned from it than I first recognized. Certainly one is that it is possible and incumbent on many of us to be better people. Upon reflection, I’d give this school a B+.