Books

Noah is a self-made sort of guy, a boy from the sticks who got himself through Princeton on his own hard work and determination. But it also left him with massive student-loan debt, and now he is squeaking by in the big city, toiling as an SAT tutor to kids at the other end of the spectrum: the scions of wealthy and privileged upper-class Manhattan.

At the opening of the novel, Noah enters the Thayer household as a tutor to Dylan, a spoiled Golden Boy who nevertheless seems to lack any ounce of common sense. Soon he is also teaching Dylan’s sister Tuscany, a sultry yet naive 15-year-old whose unwillingness to challenge herself hides a bright, ambitious mind.

Noah is no starry-eyed idealist – he knows good test scores are his paycheck – but he still takes his mentoring duties seriously, hoping to unearth some hidden spark in the Thayers. Oddly enough, however, his biggest obstacle proves to be his pupils’ mercurial mother, who is determined that her children get the results they need regardless of whether they actually deserve them.

This engaging story, fictional but based on real experiences, will no doubt endure countless comparisons to “The Nanny Diaries,” but there is at least one substantial difference: Noah’s kids are teens, and their daily life is worlds apart from the playground and juice-box set.

The Thayers, young though they are, swirl through a world of clubs, drugs, alcohol and sex so labyrinthine that Noah himself could never keep up. It’s a realistic, though somewhat frightening, look at the society these kids are expected to inhabit long before they have the character and morality for it. Noah tries to help, but he doesn’t have all the answers either, and in the end he can only teach – it is up to the kids to make of his lessons what they will.

•Books reviewed in this column are available online or at your local bookstore.