The Gifted School
Four longtime friends in the affluent college town of Crystal, Colorado, have raised their children together, vacationed together, and quietly assumed their kids were destined for something extraordinary. When the district announces plans for a new magnet academy for gifted students, with a single competitive round of applications, the friendship fractures under the sudden pressure of test prep, application essays, and whispered advantages. Bruce Holsinger follows the mothers, fathers, and children across a year as ambition, class anxiety, and outright sabotage push old alliances to the breaking point. Subplots weave in transracial adoption, intellectual property fraud, and old romantic wounds, building a sharply observed social novel about meritocracy as actually practiced by well-off American parents.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about The Gifted School
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
In a wealthy Colorado town, four old college friends and their families compete to get their children admitted to a new public school for the academically gifted, and what they are willing to do escalates fast.
The Gifted School was written by Bruce Holsinger and published in 2019. Holsinger is a University of Virginia professor whose later novels include The Displacements and Culpability.
A film or TV adaptation has been announced for The Gifted School. As of 2025, the project remains in development.
The Gifted School is 466 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Gifted School takes most readers 7 to 10 hours to finish.
The Gifted School is a standalone novel by Bruce Holsinger, not part of a series.
The Gifted School is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.