Admission: a book review

Portia Nathan has spent twenty years within the Ivy League college system, first as a student at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and then as an Admission Officer at Dartmouth and Princeton University in New Jersey. Prior to this world, she grew up in a gender-neutral home, raised by her independent single mother, not knowing her father, although her mother didn't know his name either!

As Admission by Jean Hanff Korelitz opens, Portia has been given a new territory to cover for Princeton, the New England states. Previously she worked the Pacific, which meant much longer trips away from home and her partner of sixteen years, Mark, an English professor at the University. Portia loves her job and sees herself as giving wonderful opportunities to the applicants as well as providing the University with students that will challenge them and be a joy with whom to work. Having to deny applicants, which happens to most of them, is never easy. In many cases Portia has interviewed these kids herself, met them at their schools, and definitely has read their essays about their hopes and dreams.
Things in Portia's personal life soon begin changing also, as she works through her strained relationship with her mother, and the intricacies of having both her best friend Rachel, and partner Mark, working at Princeton and enmeshed in her life on two levels. Portia has also recently met someone who attended Dartmouth at the same time as she, which has brought back memories of that important, formative time in her life.
As the reader gets to know the system, the applicants and more importantly, Portia, it becomes clear that there is a secret that no one in Portia's life, not Mark, Rachel, or Susannah her mother, knows. She has been existing, not living a full life for a long time. Admission begins to mean two things, being selected by a college, and admitting to something from the past. Portia's personal and professional lives crash together in the spring, during the Acceptance season when Portia holes up in her bed for several days:
She was suffused with shame, drenched with it, riddled with it like something metastasized. ...Everything she had ever felt or thought or done done since that day...had been felt in shame, thought in shame and done in shame. Now it felt as if that shame were leaking from every pore of her, leaking and leaking as the first day passed, and then the next and then the next. The bed was soaked with it, and the blankets and deuvets made a damp tent to huddle beneath.
There are many things to like about Admission beyond the interesting characters and story of Portia's life. I really enjoyed learning about the ever-evolving admission system, and was appalled at the behavior of many of the applicants and their parents, and also horrified that I was able to get into college myself without attempting crazy stunts. My parents did not go to college, so we never thought of anything beyond how to pay for it! I enjoyed the beginning of each chapter where there was an excerpt taken from an applicant's essay, and I really like the chapter titles. I don't read many books where the chapters have titles, and I like how it makes me think and anticipate what I am about to read.
Since everyone wants an honest review, I will say that Ms. Korelitz used many parenthetical phrases in her writing and I found this annoying. First because I don't really like them to begin with, and secondly because of my poor eyesight I didn't always see the parentheses and couldn't figure out why there were words that didn't connect with the rest of the sentence! LOL I'm sure she used them correctly according to MLA, since she herself is a Dartmouth graduate and has worked for Princeton's Office of Admission. It's just my little quirk!
Once again this was the first time I've read an author, but I now have all of her books on my TBR to get from the library!