16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Devil Wears Prada meets Nanny Diaries - An OK Summer Read, July 26, 2008
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Schooled is another mis-adventure with the uber-rich in the upper east side of New York. Reading a lot like
The Nanny Diaries: A Novel meets
The Devil Wears Prada, Schooled follows the first year of a new private school teacher as she becomes indoctrinated into the world of the obscenely rich and influential. Anisha Lakhani writing is extremely readable and her main character, Anna Taggert, is very likable. Even when Anna missteps you root for her.
Unfortunately Anna's character arch is extremely predictable and the ultimate climax of the book is fairly abrupt and not extremely climatic. What's missing from Schooled is any real depth, rather than digging deeper into the lives of Anna's students, Lakhani seems more interested in long descriptions of Anna's binge brand shopping and the Channel Bag or Prada Shoes she buys. Despite its flaws Schooled still delivers on some level, I found myself interested in following Anna's journey, even though I knew pretty well where it would turn out.
Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of Schooled is that it has the nugget of a gem of a really good book, Lakhani has a great set-up, really likable characters and an engaging writing styles, she just never digs deep enough to pull out its true potential. Still, if you're looking for a light summer read and were a huge fan of
The Nanny Diaries: A Novel you could do much worse than Schooled.
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64 of 81 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A disaster., August 7, 2008
I was in Anisha Lakhani's 7th grade English class several years ago; I was a nerdy, awkward bookworm who hung out with the other intellectual, uncool kids. We did our own homework, we were not all white, we certainly were not all wealthy, and we were basically ignored while Mrs. Lakhani chatted with the "A-Group" (we didn't call them popular, because no one really liked them) about clothes and makeup.
The portrayal of every child in this book (with the exception of one who is from Westchester) as a bratty, rich "cruiser" is offensive and smacks of hypocrisy. There definitely were a few bad eggs, the types who did have bar and bat mitzvahs at the Pierre, and it was at those parties that you could always spot Anisha Lakhani, hobnobbing with the parents she supposedly hates so much.
The fact that Mrs. Lakhani herself is one of the fashion obsessed social climbers she attempts to skewer in "Schooled" may be what keeps her protagonist, Anna Taggert, so one-dimensional and unsympathetic. She makes constant justifications for her own repellant behavior, but is judgmental of others. She claims to have been a good girl who "had never done a drug in my life" and knows nothing about fashion or labels, but recounts drunken nights as a freshman in Delta Gamma at Columbia. Which is about as believable as Miley Cyrus having been a relevant part of pop culture in the year 2005, when the book is set, and her only credits were two lines in Big Fish and one episode of her father's sitcom.
But over all, I found the quality of the writing to be the worst thing about this book -- yes, even worse than the cultural anachronisms, the lack of character exposition, and how downright obnoxious the thing is. I spent $23.95 on what reads like a first draft. Lakhani's style has been described a few times as "breezy". Well, OK, if breezy means that there are words missing from sentences, glaring grammar errors, and numerous typos littering the pages. The most descriptive words she uses are brand names, which results in sentences about as sophisticated as "The Chanel Cat sat on the Marni Mat". I now have serious retrospective concerns about the quality of my middle school education.
I can't recommend a novel that even a copy editor couldn't bring him- or herself to read. "Schooled" is not funny, it's not well-written, and the only insight it offers is a peek into the mind of a shallow, and apparently scheming, socialite; it'll probably be a bestseller.
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59 of 79 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Schooled But Not Educated, July 23, 2008
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
This book is truly appalling. I don't so much want to review it as flunk it. This novel desperately needs way more Maxwell Perkins and way less Mickey Mouse, because its pop-culture hipness pretty much guarantees it a shorter shelf life than lettuce. I don't like doling out one-star reviews flippantly, but this book is so unsatisfying, so banal, that I only wish I could give it no stars.
Our heroine, Anna Taggart, whose life and appearance bear an uncanny resemblance to our author, decides to become a private school teacher out of good old-fashioned altruism. But like numerous doe-eyed teachers before her, she abruptly discovers that the hours are bad, the pay is a feeble joke, and the parents would be happy to crucify her. That is, until she discovers the money tree that is being a private tutor to the children of the obscenely rich.
This book takes a story that arguably deserves to be told, tries to put a "Sex and the City" veneer on it, gilds her narrative with a sort of dark humor, and puts it into a slickly arranged package. Which is nice, except the actual book reads like the author sent her first draft to the publisher with nary a proofread, and the publisher was too cheap to assign her a copy checker.
The narrative is drenched in adjectives and adverbs, a sure sign of an inexperienced writer. Moreover, she doesn't appear to trust us enough to give us a measured narrator with sufficient perspective on her subject. Witness this quote from page 4: "The look on my father's face was clear: I had gone too far." But what was that look? Pinched lips, melodramatic eye rolls, stony silence? I don't know. We the audience can forgive occasional lapses like this, but when they happen over and over and over again, that's a sign that the author herself hasn't thought the details of her story through. And if she hasn't, why should we?
Plainly the book wants to jump into the chick-lit tradition. But isn't it missing a few of the usual elements of that genre? The narrator's friendships with other women can charitably be described as fleeting, and romance isn't even mentioned as a possible subplot until page 273. Chick-lit usually centers on themes of human relationship, but Anna Taggart appears unable to sustain any kind of relationship with anyone or anything other than her own internal angst.
In keeping with the chick-lit theme, the book comes with slug lines comparing it to "The Nanny Diaries" and "The Devil Wears Prada." Both of those books were quickly adapted into big-studio movies. This book was published by Hyperion, which is a subsidiary of Disney. I have a dreadful suspicion that the film version of this book is already in pre-production. As my honey said when I mentioned my fear that the Mouse was trying to fast-track a future movie, "Does their capacity to suck know no bounds?"
But that film seems to be the author's primary goal. Though the story is about an English teacher, she only ever mentions four books; most of the pop-culture references are to movies and TV shows. Our narrator doesn't describe what the characters look like, she mentions the actors they resemble. Anna herself is said to look like Jessica Alba, while other characters are the spitting image of Cindy Crawford, Pierce Brosnan, Ugly Betty, Christie Brinkley, and Santa Claus. The author isn't describing characters, she's pre-casting roles.
And let's be honest, pop-culture references date badly anyway. I can't name the last time I saw Cindy Crawford in the media; she could be wrinkled and grey by now. The author name-drops investment bank Bear Stearnes, which folded catastrophically, and the TV show "The O.C.," which was cancelled ignominiously. A party attracts the luminous presence of Kanye West and Ashlee Simpson, who were hot when the book was being written but currently dwell on the cusp of irrelevance. These, too, are a lousy shorthand so the author doesn't have to take responsibility for communicating her narrative to her own audience, and it's both insulting and lazy.
Then there are the references to New York hotspots I couldn't find on a map, movies and TV shows I've never seen, and celebrities I couldn't pick out of a lineup. If you don't live in front of your TV, then you don't so much read this book as decipher it. I know somebody scrupulously up-to-the-minute on pop culture would get what was being sold, but I resent authors who think audiences read with their Captain MidNite Secret Decoder Rings there at hand.
Who is that audience, anyway? Anybody likely to recognize this many frankly dumb movies and TV shows probably doesn't read for fun. I simply get no sense from this novel who or what is being courted, or why.
And finally there was the copy editing, which was dreadful. I realize my Advance Reading Copy may not be thoroughly edited yet, but since the publisher sends these things to potential bulk buyers, you'd think they would want to make a good impression. Instead we're shown a book that looks like it was formatted by one of the middle-school characters. The text frequently leaves words out the sentences; it's chock full of misplaced apostrophe's; and many sentences just drop key pieces of punctuation
All in all, this book really reminds me of the product of a high-school-aged apprentice writer. A really enthusiastic reader could savvy this entire novel in one rainy Saturday, but I honestly can't imagine why. I like writers, I believe in them, and I want to see them succeed. But this book is a failed effort. I cannot recommend it to anybody.
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