May Contain Nuts - by John O'Farrell (Paperback)

About the Book

The more Alice and Peter push their children, the more things there are to worry about. It's only when Alice disguises herself as her daughter in order to take a school entrance exam that she realizes the exhausting pressures the kids have been under.

Book Synopsis

Alice never imagined she would end up like this, so anxious after hearing about the dangers of meteorites that she makes her children wear bike helmets in the wading pool. Her husband, David, has taught their four-year-old to list every animal represented in Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf. But the more they push their children, the more things there are to worry about. It seems no amount of gluten rationing or herbal teas can improve their children's intellectual development, and as Alice's eldest child looks set to fail her entrance exam for the exclusive private school on which her parents have pinned all their hopes, Alice decides to take matters into her own hands. With a baseball cap pulled low over her face, Alice shuffles into a hall of two hundred kids and takes the test in place of her daughter, her first examination in twenty years. With a comic eye for detail that has sent his books to the top of the British best-seller lists, May Contain Nuts is a funny, compelling, and provocative satire of the manic world of today's overcompetitive, overprotective families.