May Contain Nuts: A Novel of Extreme Parenting - Softcover

O'Farrell, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802170153 ISBN 13: 9780802170156

Publisher: Grove Press, Black Cat, 2005

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.

About this title

About the Author

John O'Farrell has weekly columns in both The Guardian and The Independent.

Reviews

O'Farrell (This Is Your Life) is a big deal in Britain: joke writer for Blair; columns in the Guardian and the Independent; various sitcom-writing successes. In his fourth novel, Alice and David Chaplin live in south London with three young children and two conflicting obsessions: parenting their children to greatness, and shielding them from harm. Related from Alice's first-person perspective, this shrill mix produces a particularly hilarious and harebrained scheme: to protect daughter Molly from rejection by the local elite private school (and to get her in), Alice, conveniently petite and noncurvaceous, will masquerade as Molly and sit for the test. Some riotously funny situations result, with Alice deadpanning and kibitzing the whole way. Perfectly named "friends" Philip and Ffion prove perfect foils again and again, as the parents compare (precisely: Ffion e-mails an elaborate chart) their children's achievements. There are some downsides: neuroses are simply stated as fact and then slapsticked, while larger issues like urban decay and racial profiling are raised but not addressed. What O'Farrell does accomplish is a near-flawless caricature of 21st-century upper-middle-class parenthood.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Grove Press, Black Cat
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802170153
• ISBN 13: 9780802170156
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320