Meg Mitchell Moore

From the bestselling author of Vacationland comes a novel that perfectly captures the mania of the college admissions process as a seemingly perfect family comes undone by a few desperate measures, a long-buried secret--and a teenage girl's application to Harvard. "A fun, fast-paced, completely engrossing tale of a California family trying to get their eldest daughter into Harvard.... Brilliant and enjoyable on every level." --Elin Hilderbrand, #1 New York Times bestselling author of 28 Summers The Hawthorne family has it all: great jobs, a beautiful house in one of the most affluent areas of northern California, and three charming kids with perfectly straight teeth. Then comes eldest daughter Angela's senior year of high school. Suddenly, everyone is floundering. As Angela writes and rewrites her application for Harvard--her father's alma mater--and struggles to maintain her position as valedictorian, Nora Hawthorne's career hits a rough patch, taking her away from a newly distracted husband and uncharacteristically anxious younger daughters. And as the secrets everyone has been keeping will come to light, it sets the family on a final collision course that will force them to reevaluate, with humor and heart, the value of achievement.

It's early summer when Ginny and William's peaceful life in Vermont comes to an abrupt halt.First, their daughter Lillian arrives, with her two children in tow, to escape her crumbling marriage. Next, their son Stephen and his pregnant wife Jane show up for a weekend visit, which extends indefinitely when Jane ends up on bed rest. When their youngest daughter Rachel appears, fleeing her difficult life in New York, Ginny and William find themselves consumed again by the chaos of parenthood - only this time around, their children are facing adult problems. By summer's end, the family gains new ideas of loyalty and responsibility, exposing the challenges of surviving the modern family - and the old adage, once a parent, always a parent, has never rung so true.