The plot rips along, though the sporadic interjection of teenage social media posts feels clumsy and more suited to adolescent chick lit, and there are page-turning twists at the end. As the reality of a new super-selective institution dawns – 100,000 pupils across four counties can apply for only 1,000 places via a gruelling two-stage application process – previously warm, supportive relationships between parents and children are undermined by competition, suspicion, half-truths, deception and the galling realisation that elite school choice is a zero-sum game in which one child’s success ensures another’s failure. The easy, affluent atmosphere is quickly punctured by the appearance of a “magnet” school for exceptionally gifted children. All coexist in a comfortable round of work, gossip, cocktails, playdates and weekly jogs in an upmarket Colorado town where weekend ski trips are the norm and residents pride themselves on being “fit, woke and happy”. The four mothers at the centre of this story could have walked off the set of Huffman’s long-running hit series Desperate Housewives: brainy doctor Rose, warmhearted divorcee Azra, tense and touchy widow Lauren and lustrous, well-heeled Sam with her grand house and philanthropist city councillor husband. How to make fiction more jaw-dropping than fact? Bruce Holsinger’s The Gifted School, published shortly after Huffman’s conviction, carries a weighty burden.
Huffman started a short prison sentence earlier this month for buying into a sophisticated scheme that fiddled entry test scores and added nonexistent sporting accolades to students’ application portfolios.
T he revelation that Hollywood star Felicity Huffman was willing to cheat her child’s way into a top American university suggested that, when it comes to the 21st-century parental arms race, fact really is stranger than fiction.
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