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However Ivy’s life comes crashing down around her one afternoon when she is spectacularly sacked from her well paid job of 15 years. To add to her woes, Ivy returns home to find her husband sharing a bath with the glamorous wife of a former colleague.

“Floating to the ceiling, I surveyed the scene below. This cannot be happening. I’ve been fired. My husband is screwing another woman – the wife of the asshole responsible for getting me canned, no less. My entire life is falling apart on the same day. What are the odds? What do I do? If I kick him out, I won’t have a husband. I’ll be an unemployed single mother, and that would suck. I’ve gotten fat. How can I date anyone looking like this? Dammit, I’ll have to start grooming my crotch again. Why didn’t I get a tummy tuck when I could afford it? Why? Why?” (P24)

Ivy decides to kick her husband out and immediately seeks solace in her duvet and daytime television. However, with no money to pay for essential items like her life energy coach, botox, doggie day care, ski vacations and her analyst, Ivy realises her lifestyle must change quickly.

She is forced to move to a cheaper apartment in the dreaded downtown and send her two girls, Skyler and Kate, to public school. Ivy soon finds out who her true friends are as the invitations to parties and social gatherings dry up for both Ivy and her children.

Meanwhile, her best friend, Faith, has married a billionaire and her closet is now bigger than most New York apartments.

Determined not to let life’s vicissitudes get her down, the newly-single mother-of-two picks herself up, dusts herself down and reinvents herself as a ‘private schools admissions adviser’.

But Ivy has no idea what she’s let herself in for. In a parent-eat-parent world – where even four-year-olds have CVs – Ivy is driven to lengths she’d never dreamed of to satisfy her well-heeled clients who’ll do literally anything to get their little darlings into the A-list schools.

“The top twelve private schools in the city were known as the Baby Ivys. It was every status-conscious New Yorker’s dream that their child attend one of these schools, since they were a pipeline to the Ivy League colleges. Even more important, having your kid at a Baby Ivy was vital for avoiding humiliation when asked the inevitable question: ‘So where does your child go to school?’. Everyone understood that if your child didn’t attend a first-tier school, you must be a second- or third-tier family.” (P177)

Ivy takes on seven clients at $20,000 a pop to help them get their kids into elite schools, coaching them on how to jump through the incredible, but apparently necessary, hoops.

Despite down-sizing, Ivy’s love life takes a turn for the better when she embarks on a fling with hip young author Philip, who lives in her apartment block. It also becomes obvious that the local kosher deli owner and all-round nice guy, Michael, has a soft spot for her. However, Ivy makes it clear to Michael that she would never consider going out with him because he lacks ambition and she has made a pact with herself that her next husband will be a very rich man.

As the book develops it’s clear that Ivy is changing as a person as she makes new friends not based on social standing and wealth. However, when she is offered a million dollar bribe by the father of a client, her new found morals are put to the test.

Karen went to law school in her home town of Denver, before moving to New York in the mid-1980s. Here she worked as a high-flying marketing executive for American Express. Susan was on the vice-president track until the company suddenly made her redundant five years ago. She and a friend then started Smart City Kids.

Married to a fellow lawyer for the past 20 years, Karen has a young son and daughter. She knows from her own experience the terrors that await novice parents seeking a good school for their children. But she was never wealthy enough to compete against the Manhattan super-rich and only had a vague idea of how they dominated the kindergarten competition. Modest and unaffected, she lives in a fashionable, but ordinary, part of Lower Manhattan.

Karen also helped many parents of ordinary means to navigate the rough waters of the kindergarten system, which serves as a kind of doorway in American education to the more challenging levels available to older pupils.

After three years, Karen left her business to her partner and has never looked back, except to chronicle her experiences in the novel. Not surprisingly, she doesn’t miss Smart City, which her partner continues to run.

Karen says writing the novel was cathartic. She wrote the first draft of the book in just three months. She now writes full-time and is busy working on a second novel.

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