May Contain Nuts

This hilarious novel of a helicopter mom and dad is "a near-flawless caricature of 21st-century upper-middle-class parenthood" ( Publishers Weekly).   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 exam in twenty years.   From one of Britain's bestselling comic novelists, praised by the New York Times for "a tart narrative voice and a delectably understated way with wisecracks," May Contain Nuts is a provocative satire of the manic world of today's hypercompetitive, overprotective families.