Admission

Chloe Wynn Berringer has the life teenagers are supposed to want. A place at the college of her dreams is waiting, the boy she has liked since middle school is taking her to prom, and her best friend is loyal. Her mother, a B-list Hollywood celebrity, is hoping to climb a rung higher.

Then the FBI arrives at the front door with weapons drawn. Chloe's mother is arrested in a huge college admissions bribery scandal, and the plans Chloe had counted on fall apart in a single morning.

Chloe may face charges herself, and possibly prison. The public is angry, reporters crowd in, and the US attorney wants a conviction. Each privilege she never questioned is stripped away in turn.

The novel follows Chloe as she tries to work out what actually happened and how much of it she understood. She has to ask why her parents believed she could only succeed if they cheated for her, and what she knew before the agents came. Beneath those questions sits a harder one the book keeps returning to: what it means to be complicit in something from which one benefited.