Lucy Jackson, Posh

Posh

Lucy Jackson

St. Martin's, Jan 2007, $23.95

ISBN: 0312363893

In Manhattan, few schools rival the excellent reputation of the exclusive, private Griffin High School. The excellence is in terms of its luxurious environs as learning takes a somewhat back seat to test achievement, which the headmistress Katryn The "Lazy" Hoffman considers education and an affluent environment, the only type of place she can administer though the parents are driving her insane with their absurd demands almost as sublime as that of her husband; helping her cope is her affair.

Scholarship student Julianne Coopersmith feels somewhat of an outsider as almost all her peers are wealthy. She worries about her best friend Morgan Goldfine, whose mother just passed away. Morgan has not been able to move on while Julianne has learned to appreciate her pain-in-the-butt mother whose over-protectiveness has driven Julianne crazy, but is now welcome to a degree. She is also concerned about the recent out-of-control behavior of her boyfriend, Harvard-bound Michael Avery, whose destructive acts of late have teetered on violence and making Julianne consider dumping him as the mood swings scare her.

This stereotypical satire uses an upper crust Manhattan school as the milieu to lampoon relationships. The two prime hubs, Juliana and Katryn are on the surface opposites, but share a common distaste for the elitist attitude of Griffin even as one cheats on her spouse while the other struggles to remain loyal to her boyfriend. Both feel out-of-place at the POSH high school. Though similar school days have been in several novels, the dysfunctional relationships that run the gamut make for an amusing look at what vouchers will get the poor; though in this case it is a middle class scholarship student who feels out of place.

Harriet Klausner