ruthchinn | Reading

The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association by Caitlin Rozakis (2025): DNF. I've come to the conclusion that "X-type-of-book BUT IT'S SCI-FI/FANTASY" is that I have to like the X type of book to actually enjoy the riff on it. In this situation, it's "mom deals with PTA and discrimination against her family BUT IT'S MAGIC PRESCHOOL for her turned-against-their-will-in-traumatic-circumstances werewolf daughter". I got like 80 pages into it and flipped to the end to discover that, yes, the only parent who was being friendly to her was, per the trope, the one who was going to betray her and turn on her, and that, also per the trope, The Big Evil Was High-Stakes Testing All Along. I agree that high-stakes testing is bad! I am not, it turns out, interested in reading a book about how parents hurt other people to subvert the high-stakes testing process so that their kid can get into the school they want to! Even though it's magic! The worldbuilding is not enough to overcome the fact that I don't enjoy reading the underlying plot.

But if that is your thing, this is the book for you.

But on the topic of High-Stakes Testing Is The Enemy: high-stakes testing, like homework and mandatory volunteering, was something I was against when I was the student involved and figured it was just because, hey, I was the student, and now that I am on the other side of it, I loathe it all the more (if the school wants the kids to do 180 hours of mandatory volunteering per year, they can get off their asses and do it during school time. Oh, that's a waste of school time and parents would complain? How interesting.). However. My objection to high-stakes testing is the high-stakes high-pressure environment.

The objection of the villain in this book is not to the high-stakes. That objection is to the purpose of high-stakes testing, which is to attempt to equalize the playing field. The villain's kid isn't good enough academically to get into the desired upper school. In this case, high-stakes testing is the enemy because then admission isn't (in theory) based on who you know and being the right sort of person. (And the book is aware of this! There are consultants who can help get your kid into the school!)

But there is also a question, one that I mentally refer to essentially as The Harvard Question (but it's not specifically Harvard, you could swap in Yale or Oxbridge), which is: is the school prestigious because rich people go there, or do rich people go there because it's prestigious. That is, I feel it's generally understood that, for some schools, the quality of education truly does not matter when it comes to that school's place in the culture; the school is prestigious because of the students who go there (and the reputation it holds from students who have gone there in the past). The purpose is social environment and being around The Right Sort and Making Connections; education is secondary (and, often, education is only important to scholarship students -- these days, especially in prestigious schools at the middle/high school level, my impression has been that the scholarship students are the only ones actually keeping those schools high-ranked in terms of test scores, because they are the only ones who care about test scores and they are the only ones whose place in the school depends on the test scores; the school depends on the scholarship students to maintain the academic prestige level, while not in any way shape or form trying to kick out the students who drag down the test score average so long as they have the right parents. The school is prestigious because of the rich people.)

And so if the rich students all go somewhere else, does that new school become prestigious? Or does it, instead, reflect poorly on the rich students. Would Oxbridge lose some of its prestige if it stopped churning out prime ministers?

Which comes back around to: is the prestigious upper school that the villain's kid can't get into, what makes that school the one everyone wants to get into? Is it because of the rich/well-connected students? Or does it provide a quality education? (Or both.)

But if this is a case where the only way to get into Magical Oxbridge is to go to Magical Eton and the only way to get into Magical Eton is either high-stakes testing, or cheating/fraud, and you are only going to get certain highly-desired jobs if you did go to Magical Oxbridge (or Harvard Law), then the problem is entirely in the system, and switching from legacy-based admissions to high-stakes testing admission for middle/high school does not do a damn thing to help. Because it's just moving the goalpost of when the vital admission occurs, and moving that goalpost younger and younger and younger, and putting the onus on the students to be good enough at taking tests. (Also academic sandbagging can come into play here, but that's irrelevant to this book as far as I read it.)

But of course that's a situation that testing is meant to equalize, so you don't have to make sure your kid gets into the correct middle school to have any hope of that child ever clerking for the Supreme Court.

A lot of these kinds of books that I've read also -- I was gonna say "give short shrift" but often they give zero shrift at all -- for the kids who don't get to go to the Best School. What happens to the rest? What does actually happen if they have to go to the safety school, the third-best school, the worst school. So much is made of making sure the best and the brightest can go to the prestige schools, and little attention is on everyone else. The ones designated not good enough to get a good education, as education standards are presented.

At least in this book, it's made clear the high-stakes nature of the testing for the protag and her daughter: if the daughter fails out at the kindergarten level and isn't admitted to first grade, the alternative is bad. Because discrimination and the inherent decisions made in the worldbuilding in order to give it stakes to the protagonist. (Even though I'm not sure high-stakes testing at this level actually makes any sense here, but, go with it, price of admission and I also did not read a lot of this book.)

(because, okay, the issue is scarcity issues: there are more Deserving Kids than there are spots in the school -- I was once told a statistic with no citation whatsoever, that there are more high school valedictorians with a perfect GPA and perfect SAT scores than there are spots in the freshman class at Harvard, and quite frankly I do actually believe that, without any data whatsoever -- however, there doesn't seem to be other feeder preschools in this fictional situation, so are they artificially having a larger preschool class than they have spots in first grade, thus creating the pressure? What limits their ability to expand their first grade class so they can guarantee a place in first grade for every one of their kindergarteners? Does their exclusive reputation require that they have many more applicants than spots, thus making them seem Exclusive And Prestigious And Good, rather than just a safety school which isn't exclusive or cool or prestigious because it lets in Those Sort Of People, You Know, The Poors.)

Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford (2024): In other news, a noir murder mystery set in alternate history United States. DNF. But hey if I were more into noir murder mysteries...

But among the things that really threw me out of it from the beginning is that the noir detective is a cop. I haven't read as widely as many others in this kind of genre (especially since -- look it may sound like I'm allergic to murder mysteries but really I'm just a little too full of them, in the metaphoric sense, and would prefer some mysteries that aren't murder) but it really threw me that the protagonist was a cop.

This is also one of the kinds of books where I flipped to the end and read the end and was like "well, guess there was clearly a lot of plot going on" and then was like "ah so the author does not want to do a sequel".

Things I wish I had time for: writing a proper post about media/my life.

Things I actually have time for: this brief post to ask about very practical travel considerations.

*

So, I tried to make this happen last year and it didn't work out, and it will likely still not work out this year either, BUT I am very keen on trying.

For work/family/sanity reasons I might be in the US at some point during August-September (yes, as in a few weeks from now). If this happens, I might have discretionary time to visit friends, whether locally or in some other area of the continent, so would love to hear from you if you'll be around and want to meet up during that time.

The one location I'm guaranteed to visit, if I go, is New York City, so please let me know if you're there and would want to meet up!

If elsewhere in the US (or Canada) and want to meet, let me know as well! I haven't been to that part of the world in over a decade so, no idea who's where these days/would want to meet me.

Let me know <3 Comments or private DW message both OK.

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Ruth B. Chinn

Reading

Assignments sent!

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (2021)

Two DNFs

Not an update post

monthly word count - june

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August 2025

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