Abstract
Reviewed by: The Education of Hailey Kendrick Claire Gross Cook, Eileen . The Education of Hailey Kendrick. Simon Pulse, 2011. [272p]. Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-4424-1325-2 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-4424-1330-6 $9.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 8-10. Long-suffering Hailey Kendrick can trace her anxious perfectionism to the day several months after her mother’s death when her father decided that parenting was too much trouble and shipped her off to boarding school. For her graduation present, Hailey requests that she and her dad spend “the whole summer together before college”; when her father informs her that he’s reneging on their plans, she goes a little off the deep end, leaving her dorm after curfew, attempting to behead a school statue, and ultimately getting caught kissing her boyfriend’s best friend, Joel (he starts things, but she goes with it). In addition to public humiliation and rejection by her boyfriend (the son of celebrities, he has some major trust issues), Hailey is sentenced to work on the school’s cleaning crew until her wages accrue to recoup the damage to the statue. Cook uses class tensions (between students and townies; between celebrities and scholarship kids) to add some grit to all the operatics, and though some depictions border on caricature, the issues raised are valid and unobtrusive. The resulting story is a frothy blend of social politics, keenly felt angst, boarding-school hijinks, and rom-com banter, as Hailey stumbles into a life outside her comfort zone and is rescued from self-pity (and, on occasion, ill-advised window escapes) by Drew, her super-cute, sardonic nineteen-year-old janitorial co-worker/supervisor. Cook offers a nice twist on the classic YA discovery-of-friend’s-unrequited-feelings-via-accidental-kiss trope by providing in Drew a new and ultimately more compatible love interest, and readers will be glad to see Hailey finally finding somebody who appreciates her. [End Page 274] Copyright © 2011 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
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