Admission's title plays off its dual meaning - "admission" being both the act of letting something in and letting something out. After well over a decade as an Ivy League college-admissions officer (first at her alma mater, Dartmouth, and then at Princeton), both of those definitions converge in one academic year for Portia Nathan.

Portia's professional life revolves around "travel season," when she visits secondary schools to give presentations to prospective Princeton applicants and answer their questions; "reading season," when the admissions staff is immersed in reviewing thousands of applicant files; and "decision season," when officers discuss and determine the fate of every single applicant in committee. During this particular travel season, one of her visits is to a new experimental school in New Hampshire, where she encounters a former Dartmouth classmate on the faculty and one unusual student who makes a special impression on her; they stay on her mind throughout her other travels, distracting her from the strain in her relationship with her long-time partner, Mark, until he shocks her to attention by an admission of his own. The total immersion of reading season gives Portia an excuse to avoid thinking about her domestic life, while contemplating the files of applicants - including that one unusual student, who turns up for a campus visit along with that faculty member - pulls her in other directions. The approach of decision season finds her being drawn back to some of her own decisions -and non-admissions - in the past, and how they got her to where she is now.

The novel mixes the nuts and bolts of the college-admissions process with Portia's story, and I thought author Jean Hanff Korelitz did this very well. Part of her research for the novel included a stint as a seasonal application reader in Princeton University's real-life Admissions Office; while some of the details may apply more at highly selective colleges than to U of State, there's a lot of interesting insight into what colleges look for from prospective students, and what they do with it. Each chapter opens with an excerpt from a college-application essay, and sketches of the applicants Portia is getting to know through the files she's reading are sprinkled throughout the novel. It's not always clear what they have to do with the main plot, but I found them engaging rather than distracting.

There are a few threads to the story that are a bit more distracting - for me, the biggest one was the sideline concerning Portia's mother Susannah. It's not irrelevant, and I understand why it's there, but it felt bigger than necessary to me. On the whole, though, this struck me as one of those books where the reader has to be patient and trust the writer; most of the elements that seem random at first really do have a place in the context of revealing Portia's character.

I have a passing familiarity with Portia's academic surroundings (I was a faculty wife in my former life with my former husband), and fiction in that setting frequently appeals to me. However, despite that, I saw this as a "domestic" novel; the suspense and drama in the story are of the everyday, character-driven variety, and much of the plot wasn't hard for me to anticipate. I like that too, though, so it wasn't a drawback. But I think one's reaction to the novel depends on how one feels about Portia, ultimately. I liked and related to her, and felt that her personal growth over the year spanned by the story was believable.

I 'm not sure that I've found a new addition to my "favorite authors" list, but I do think that Admission will turn out to be one of my favorite works of fiction this year, although I feel like I'm having trouble articulating exactly why it struck such a chord with me. I knew I wanted to read Admission as soon as I started seeing reviews of it last spring, and hearing Jean Hanff Korelitz speak on a panel at the LA Times Festival of Books just reinforced that. It was on my "waiting for the paperback" list until it became one of the first books I bought to read on my new Kindle, and I'm glad I'm not waiting to read it anymore. ( )

This is the story of Portia Nathan, an admissions officer at Princeton University. When we meet Portia, she is traveling to high schools in the Northeast, reading thousands of application essays, and making hard decisions about who will get in, who will get wait-listed, and who will get the thin envelopes with the "admission denied" letters. She lives with her long-time boyfriend Mark, a professor in the English department, and goes to dinner parties, but her work is the center of her life.

As the story unfolds through "reading season" (the time when applications are reviewed), we learn more about Portia and about the decisions she made when she was young. When past decisions come back to haunt her, she is forced to look up from the stacks of applications and focus on her own life decisions. (OK, that's really vague, but I don't want to give anything away.)

I really liked this book. Korelitz does not let her prose get in the way of the story. In Portia, she has created a character who is flawed, but ultimately likable (at least in my opinion). And although I saw the plot twists coming from way down the road, the story is engaging.

But, most of all, I am fascinated by reading about people's work lives. I'm a management professor and I research how work experiences influence people and organizations. In Admission, Korelitz reveals the ups and downs of life as an admissions officer. She worked as a part-time reader for Princeton's Office of Admission for two years while writing this book, and the book paints a very clear picture of the difficulty of the decisions that must be made. It was fascinating to read about the stories behind the envelopes that arrive in the mailboxes of high school seniors each spring.

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I enjoyed the book because the main character, a college admissions officer, uses her vantage point to speculate on the BIG questions -- what makes a worthwhile life? How do we assign value to a person? The judging involved in Portia's job is inherently interesting. However, I get the feeling that the author saved up all the deep thoughts she had of this nature while she was working in admissions in real life, then included all of them in this book. The novel could have benefitted from a bit more editing! ( )

Admission tells the story of 38 year old Portia Nathan, an admissions officer at Princeton University, who along with her colleagues decides the fate of the many hopeful teens who apply each year to Princeton University. Portia's personal story is intertwined with the admission process, from visiting high schools, through reading the applications brimming with academic and social success until the committee meetings in which the students' futures are decided upon. Portia's childhood with a radical feminist single mother is recounted and a secret from the past is first alluded to and finally revealed.

Admission drags at first, picks up a bit in the middle, and limps to an unsatisfying ending. Portia is not very sympathetic and ultimately it's hard to really care about her. The supporting characters - her mother, best friend, partner, college boyfriend - are not fully developed and fairly one dimensional, each filling a solitary role. The mother, who is described in greater detail is just not that likable. The story about the admission process was interesting though you're hit over the end with how hard the job of an admission officer is, having to sort through so many gems, maintain fairness, and deal with the fallout from alumni whose kids don't make the cut.

Admission concludes with a feel good ending that ties up all the loose strings and left me unsatisfied. ( )