Class
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3.5 • 10 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Named one of the Best Books of 2017 by the Philadelphia Inquirer: All hell breaks loose in the liberal bubble when a mother's life spirals out of control when she's forced to rethink her bleeding heart ideals.
For Karen Kipple, it isn't enough that she works full-time in the nonprofit sector for an organization that helps children from disadvantaged homes. She's also determined to live her personal life in accordance with her ideals. This means sending her daughter, Ruby, to an integrated public school in their Brooklyn neighborhood.
But when a troubled student from a nearby housing project begins bullying children in Ruby's class, the distant social and economic issues Karen has always claimed to care about so passionately begin to feel uncomfortably close to home. A daring, discussable satire about gentrification and liberal hypocrisy, Class is also a smartly written story that reveals how life as we live it -- not as we like to imagine it -- often unfolds in gray areas.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
On the surface, Karen Kipple has much to be content about. But despite her job as a fund-raiser at a nonprofit in New York, a spacious condo that she and her hardworking husband own thanks to some inherited money, and a bright third-grade daughter, Ruby, Karen isn't exactly happy. At first, it seems clear that her dissatisfaction stems from her insistence on white-liberal perfection: avoidance of artificial chemicals in foods, commendable work, and Ruby's attendance at a racially diverse neighborhood school, Constance C. Betts Elementary. But when a classmate of Ruby's transfers out of Betts to a school with mostly privileged white students, Karen's ideals begin to crack. Karen duplicitously moves Ruby to the wealthier school, launches an affair with a billionaire donor, and breaks the law in what she describes as "the most selfless act of her nonprofit career." The story is uncomfortable and excellently handled by Rosenfeld (I'm So Happy for You); it invites questions about faithfulness and philanthropy, one's obligation to those less fortunate, and what it means to be middle-class in an unequal society.
