The Ivy Chronicles Hardback - 2005

by Karen Quinn

When turbocharged Park Avenue mom Ivy Ames finds she's been downsized from her high-powered corporate job and her marriage, she swiftly realizes that she's going to need a whole new way to support herself and her two private-school daughters. At first she does the obvious thing: she panics. Then she decides to put her years of marketing savvy to work and dreams up a brilliant new business - helping upscale New Yorkers get their little darlings into the most exclusive kindergartens in the city.

Ivy enters a parent-eat-parent world where the egos are directly proportional to their owners' enormous incomes, peopled by her only-in-Manhattan clients, including:

- Lilith Radmore-Stein, a newspaper mogul who is willing risk her entire empire in a demented effort to get her son admitted to Harvard Day
- Omar Kutcher ('Kutcher the Butcher'), a cold-blooded mob boss who seeks Ivy's counsel on whether to bump off or pay off the powers-that-be to get his 'little pistol' into the city's best all-girls Catholic school
- Stu Needleman, Ivy's most obnoxious client, who threatens to ruin her if she won't help his four-year-old unibrowed daughter cheat on her kindergarten entrance exam
- Willow Bliss and Tiny Herrera, the biracial lesbian parents of an adopted wheelchair-bound black child who is the 'triple crown of diversity' that every school will covet

From the backstabbers of corporate America to the leading toddlers of Fifth Avenue, The Ivy Chronicles is more than an insider's look at this elite and utterly preposterous universe. It is also a tale of midlife reinvention and unexpected romance - for anyone who has ever lost what she holds dear and had to start over again.