By Ari Morgan The Applicants

by Ari Morgan

Groomed for a place at a Big Name School since their obsessed, status-conscious helicopter parents passed out cigars at the Stockstill General Hospital Neonatal Unit, the privileged students of Pembrocton College Preparatory are proof that the profile of the ideal Ivy League candidate is almost identical to that a of serial killer—or, at the very least, that of a sociopath. The end of first semester of junior year signals the beginning of Mutual the Terminal Chapter in the race to get into college. And the PCP juniors are gloating, jubilant at the rumor that the valedictorian presumptive has received a B on her report card, a grade that will relegate her to in-state hell. Her heir apparent, a three-generation Yale legacy, is the sole mourner at the demise of her future – if only because her thoughtlessness is going to derail his plans to attend MIT. Across town, in the grafitti-covered halls of Stockstill High School, the students slink to class, praying that they arrive without a knife wound—and dream of ivy-covered walls. They have finally succeeded in convincing the Board of Education to introduce a full roster of AP classes into the curriculum. And with the help of a take-no-prisoners principal and an enterprising parent, the students at SHS begin to take ownership of the college admission process—encroaching shamelessly on territory normally reserved for their wealthy private school rivals. What happens when the decisions roll in and the smoke clears? Written in a narrative voice that evokes Erma Bombeck with a soupçon of David Sedaris and a touch of Lauren Weisberger, The Applicants is a darkly comic novel about the lengths we go, the heights we scale—and the depths to which we sink—to get into the “right” college.

Paperback

First published July 2, 2014

About the author

Ari Morgan is just one of the many alter egos that inhabit the psyches of a mother-daughter team that has devoted the better part of their lives (and much of their sanity) to guiding college-bound students through the admissions process. Despite her best efforts, Ari has not managed to solve the greatest of life's mysteries: "What is it about the college admissions process that renders ordinarily intelligent adults and their offspring stark raving mad?" An unrepentant grammarian, Ari spends her leisure time seeking out and destroying extraneous apostrophes, inserting Oxford commas, and otherwise defending the English language against diction errors, dangling modifiers, and syntactic lapses. Her battle cry: "Proper punctuation saves lives!" Daughter lives in Phoenix with her long-suffering partner and two wretched cats. Mom lives in Phoenix with her long-suffering, wretched husband. Ari (and her alter egos) can be reached at arimorganbooks@gmail.com.