I was very interested in this book, but did not end up liking it as much as I had hoped. I think it will do ok, but won't be a top read.

Mischa Abramavicius has applied to all of her dream Ivy League colleges. With her perfect A-grades, she must get into one, right? But then she gets one rejection letter after the other, even from her last option safety school, which leaves her totally in shock, and more, in question. It seems like all her hard work of the past year and the dedication of her mom to send her to a good prep school all was for nothing. Most of all, she feels quilty and doesn't tell her mom, who is convinced she is accepted to her last option safety school.
As she is trying to come to terms with her uncertain school future, a lot of questions arise. How could she not be accepted? Something obviously stinks, and she starts a secret investigation to get to the bottom of this.With the help of her best friend and sometimes crush, Nate, and a group of eccentric techies known as "The Ophelia Syndicate'', they get into the school administration of their high school Blanchard Academy and find out that Mischa's transcript and grades where hacked! But by whom, and why? It seems the school has a lot of dark secret involving the parents who donate the most money to the school.

Altough it had some slow moments where the story didn't go forward very much, this is a funny and entertaining read. The story starts as a drama, but quickly turn into some serious investigation and hacking with some really entertaing plot twists and turns. They discover a grade changing ring set up by the school board that rewards the students whose parents have donated a lot of money to the school and that penalizes students who do very well but are poor. This discovery schocks and shakes the normal quiet community of the private high school of Blanchard Academy. I really liked this sleuthing part and how it wrapped up in the end. Besides that the character of Mischa was very likeable and I liked how the author also showed her family life with a single mom who works hard to give her daughter the best future. I recommend reading this entertaining and original book!

Love love loved this book - as did my 12yo, who (I later discovered when my pages were never where left off) was reading the story when I put the kindle down.

Ariel Kaplan does a great job building the plot - when you find yourself railing at the characters in the book like they are standing right in front of you, you know you've found a winner. She also does a great job with voice - Misha's is loud and clear and you will be rooting for her. Smart, snappy dialogue and great supporting characters.

Mischa Abramavicius is an over-achiever who has done EVERYTHING she should to get into college, so when the college rejections start pouring in, you feel her shock. And she doesn't sit back and woe-is-me, she takes action with a delightfully clever group of teen hackers. The anxiety and stress she feels is tangible, and I think readers will relate.

I was surprised this was listed as children's fiction, and think it's more geared to the younger end of YA in terms of being relatable to the situation. I love the book and will be looking forward to more from the author.

Librarian: This one is a clever contemporary mystery, that should be enjoyed by fans of contemporary romance, and fans of contemporary mystery. I can think of several patrons in my library who will enjoy this one. If you have readers who are fans of Rainbow Rowell or Becky Albertelli, then this is a good one to recommend.
Reader: Not my preferred genre. But it is one that I've read a fair bit of since it's a popular one. Judging by the other books in this genre that I've read, this one should be a hit. It still isn't my favorite genre, but it's an interesting romp all the same.

Senior high school student Mischa Abramavicious is confident that college acceptance letters would soon start rolling in but come Admissions Day and what she got instead were we-regret-to-inform-you after we-regret-to-inform-you. She is in denial because her grades, test scores and extra curriculars are all in adherence to the College Admissions Formula that they follow in expensive private school, Blanchard Prep. Also, she can’t bring herself to tell the bad news to her hardworking single mom.

I’ve read an excerpt of this before downloading the full eARC in Netgalley and I was hooked by the funny and casual narration and dialogues. The fun and casual tone is pretty much consistent throughout the book even after Mischa found out that she did not get in any colleges that she applied for. There is this amusing moment when Mischa was full-on hating herself that she wrote FAILURE on her forehead. She immediately pulled out from the angst and laughed at herself, proceeded to erase the writing only to realize that she unknowingly picked up a waterproof eyeliner pencil. She ended up cutting her own bangs to cover the her self-vandalized forehead and went to school with uneven new fringes. I thought this is the kind of series of unfortunate events that can realistically happen to me.

Good thing is that she has a supportive bestfriend in Nate who not only helped to straighten out her uneven bangs but also introduced her to The Ophelia Syndicate, a trio of tech whiz girls, willing to assist in uncovering why Mischa didn’t get in to any uni despite her good grades and all. What follows suit is an investigation by a group of teens. It pretty much reads like a YA mystery story without a murder or a monster. The mystery element of the book is a solid plot. It kept my interest and the revelation of the mystery elements, albeit not super extra special shocker, made perfect sense to me.

Mischa’s personality is the kind of practical student who does what needs to be done and socialize with whom needs to be socialized with, for her goals. Her initial goal in the book is to get in a good college. So the set of friends around her were the student body officers type. When her Ivy League dreams went down the drain, her goal became finding out why she wasn’t accepted. So she ditched her regular crowd which includes her second bestfriend Caroline, for The Ophelia Syndicate, a non-sanctioned school club with three non-conformist members. Her first bestfriend Nate is the only consistent person before and after the college rejections debacle so their friends to more than friends trope also makes sense.

I guess Mischa is right in the middle of my character likability meter. Her relationship with her mom is endearing but probably because of the book’s even light tone, I find no single emotional moment between them. Her romance subplot is cute but I didn’t feel overly swoony about it. What I’m not fond most about her though is her almost passive role in solving the mystery. It’s as if she became friends with The Ophelia Syndicate trio because they are currently of use to her. The trio put a lot of work in getting into the bottom of the mystery but the book didn’t give us much on why they are so willing and invested in Mischa’s plight. What exactly were their motivations in helping Mischa? The rapport between Mischa and The Ophelia Syndicate girls felt like an insta-friendship to me.

Handling rejections is pretty much a universal life experience. We all handle it differently and I love reading about characters dealing with it. “We Regret to Inform You” is a fairly entertaining YA contemporary infused with elements of mystery about a teen grappling with her first taste of rejection.

Mischa Abramavicious is an overachiever. She excelled on her SAT exam and has a stellar GPA filled with extracurricular activities. College should be no problem. When she's denied to all her top picks and even 'final' choice schools, she can't help but wonder what happened. With the help of her best friend Nate and a group of girls with serious hacking skills, she finds a dark secret at her prestigious high school.

What worked: Wowza. Just wow. The voice in this novel totally grabbed me. Humorous with snappy dialogue that keeps you turning the pages. The whole theme of an overachieving teen and the high level of anxiety totally rang true. Mischa is that student who is 'perfect'. She does everything right, takes all the AP classes, studies all night to make sure she gets that A, and has high aspirations of attending an elite college when she graduates. When that dream is taken away, she doesn't know who she really is. I really feel this novel will speak to teens out there who deal with the high pressure of succeeding. I personally have seen this with my own teenager. The stress and peer pressure to be on the top is very real.

The conspiracy angle of the story makes sense when readers find out who is behind tampering transcripts in order to keep some teens, like Mischa, out of college. I liked how it wasn't oblivious at first, but the characters have to figure out not only by getting into the school's database, but have to trust each other too.

Friendships are challenged and new ones are formed. Also the whole question of what about having fun and not taking life too seriously is addressed too.

Must-read contemporary novel of a teen who finds out that everything she'd worked toward disappears and how she must trust others to find out the truth of a dark secret in her high school. Laced with snappy dialogue and humor, this is a story sure to resonate with readers.

This was a quick and cute read. The story was a bit predictable at times, but there was a mystery involved which kept me turning the pages.

Mischa Abramavicius has life figured out—until Admissions Day at her pricey private college-prep high school. The day when all of her classmates receive acceptance letters in their email inboxes from Ivy-league institutions and hers fills with bad news.

Her mom, a single parent, has instilled in her from the time she could talk that in order to make something of herself, Mischa would need to go to a top-tier university. Mischa had done everything possible to get in—she studied hard and earned the best grades in her class. She joined clubs to enhance her admissions applications. She followed the guidance counselor’s formula to the letter.

And now look at her. Even worse, she received a rejection letter from the local last resort college—one even a straight C student should get in to.

Unable to tell her mom the truth, Mischa flirts with disaster at every step. When she visits her last-choice college admissions office, she discovers that something is horribly wrong with her transcripts.

She has two choices: accept her fate or fight back. Accepting her fate seems like the easiest choice. Her best friend tries to console her (she’d prefer that he’d just kiss her), and that helps a little. But when the Ophelia Syndicate decides to take on her case, things start to look up.

I can’t decide if I like the book because I have a morbid curiosity about the other fifth live, or dislike it because my students will never have those problems.

While a fun tale with a good moral, 95% of the people I’ve known would not relate to Mischa and her ‘poor-rich-kid’ friends. Sure, the protagonist comes from a single-parent family where the mom works for an altruistic law firm instead of a high-powered firm. But all of Mischa’s friends live the rich-kid life.

The ethnic mix of secondary characters saves the book from total prep-school-rich-kid boredom. Parents looking for books for their pre-teens might want to pass on this book. It fits solidly in Young Adult genre. A supporting character questions his sexual identity (although this element seemed an afterthought and not integral to the plot) and the protagonist seeks autonomy from the family unit.

Wow, this is a great book!!

1. College rejection EMAILS suck. I can relate. And an email feels even worse than a letter because it seems like they couldn’t even be bothered to buy a stamp. Ugh, it’s painful.

2. “We Regret to Inform” pleasantly surprised me as somewhat of a mystery book. Mischa and her friends/classmates try to unravel how she was rejected from 7 schools and the story is very engaging.

Read “We Regret to Inform You”!!

I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I have some mixed opinions about the YA novel WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU by Ariel Kaplan. This is a story of Mischa Abramavicius, a scholarship student at a prep school, who has joined tons of clubs and worked hard for excellent grades and test scores, all to get into a selective college. Her friends accomplish that goal with surprising ease, but she receives rejection letters not only from her reach schools, but also from her local safety school. WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU certainly evokes a variety emotions and overachievers will find themselves in this novel, but may also have a hard time reading parts of it. I think the best fit is likely to be with Freshmen and Sophomores despite their distance from the college application process. My biggest disappointment was the absence of any really empathy from adults. Was Mischa so narrowly focused that she had failed to develop a supportive relationship with a teacher or club sponsor? Just recently, The New York Times published an opinion piece about how important that is at the college level and we stress that for our students, too.

WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU has some funny moments, a light romance, and a fairly fast pace. The mystery aspect builds as some female STEM club members attempt to find out who has been altering transcripts. Readers will benefit from the reminders about how easily online accounts, include email, may be hacked and how little online privacy exists. In addition, Mischa and her friends, especially Nate, offer several wise observations as she tries to figure out who she really is:
"At any point in your life, you are two people. There's the Mischa you think you are, and then there’s the Mischa everyone else sees.... who gets you into college, or not. That's the one who applies for jobs, and mortgages, and gets written about in the paper." or
"What would you have done differently? .... I would have had fun .... More fun, I guess. I wouldn't have joined twenty clubs I don't care about and studied very minute." or
"You can see what all our struggles are worth. They have exactly as much meaning as we give them, and not one bit more."

WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU was given a starred review by Kirkus and by VOYA. I am also looking forward to reading Kaplan's debut, Grendel's Guide to Love and War, which received multiple starred reviews.

Link to New York Times article: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/17/opinion/college-students.html

Mischa Abramavicious is the perfect student: she has all the grades it needs to get into the best colleges, her list of extracurricular activities is impressive and her single-parent mom will be proud of her. But on Admission Day, she only gets rejections. None of the schools has admitted her, not even the local safety college. But how come? Mischa doesn’t dare to tell her mother but starts investigating instead. Together of the Ophelia Club, a bunch of tech-wise girls of her school, and her friend Nate, they discover that marks and letter of recommendation have been changed – but why, and especially: be whom?

“We Regret to Inform You” is a well-written novel about today’s teenagers and the pressure they are under. Only when the whole world falls apart for Mischa does she realize that she actually has no hobbies, not even an interest but that she has spent the last for years only working for her résumé and to fulfil her mother’s expectations. The later, too, also put much in her daughter’s future, invested money she didn’t have to get her into an expensive private school which promised the best starting point for an Ivy League University.

I really liked Ariel Kaplan’s style of writing. Even though a major catastrophe is happening to the protagonist, the novel is not really depressing but quite entertaining since there are many comic situations and ironic dialogues. The novel concentrates on the positive side which I liked a lot, Mischa doesn’t give up, but her focus shifts and she finally gets to understand herself better. She makes the best of it and fights for her rights – but not at the expense of everything else. So, it still is a young adult novel even though there are some underlying very serious issues.

We Regret To Inform You was a book I was eagerly anticipating, because I had this feeling. You know, the one you have for a book you know you’ll enjoy. I’m really happy to say that, I was right.

Sweet, fun, entertaining, We Regret To Inform You was, for me, a bingeable kind of read. With the main topic of it being about a teenager not getting into the college of her choice, it really emphasized the process of getting into college at all in the United States. Being French, I never had to go through this stressful, complicated process with university applications (it is very different here from the US), so it was a really interesting discovery, too. You know me, I love books dealing with school and pressure.

Our main character really wants to be the perfect, straight A, Harvard and every Ivy-League school material and has worked, with her single mom’s encouragement, towards it her entire life (almost). I really empathized with her struggles as everything goes the wrong way for her and was rooting for her right from the start, too. Her narration, sarcastic, funny, bold, was really good to read. This book also got its share of good side-characters, from the best friend (who is bisexual, yay!) to the group of girls hackers (yay!).

Overall, We Regret To Inform You was a fun read, yet dealing with important topics such as the difference between who you are and the face you show to the world, school pressure. I’d definitely recommend it!

I received a copy of this book thanks to Netgalley and Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

I was low enough now to see cars on the highway, with little tiny people inside them, driving to and fro, like little ants move things around. I realized that I, too, am a tiny ant. I live on this marble-shaped planet with seven billion other ants, and every one of us is convinced that our problems, our lives, are somehow eternal and insurmountable, but look! You go up a mile or two, you look out at the horizon, and you can see what all our struggles are worth. They have exactly as much meaning as we give them, and not one bit more.

Going into this book I honestly thought that it was just going to be about self discovery, and don't get me wrong there isn't anything wrong with books like that, but they just aren't for me. So needless to say I didn't have high hopes for it, nothing more than 2.5-3 stars.

I am so happy to say that this book shattered my expectations. Mischa applies to 7 different colleges, they run the gamut, from reach schools to safety "everyone gets in" schools. Email by email she gets rejected and her world falls down around her. Her mother slaved and scraped, and went into debt to get Mischa into an "elite" high school to ensure that Mischa received the best education possible so that Mischa would never have to struggle like she did. But at least Mischa has her safety school, Paul Revere, right? Wrong. She was rejected from there as well! Mischa recruits friends and strangers alike to help her figure out where things went so terribly wrong.

I did not expect the direction this book took, and I lived for it. I couldn't stop reading it, I was glued to my kindle until I could confirm things were rectified. I will say that Mischa as a character ABSOLUTELY infuriated me. I wanted to reach into the book and slap her silly. Not once did she bother to inform her mother of what was going on, even when things go REALLY bad. I understand that she was scared of being a disappointment to her mother, but lying is never the way to go. Lies always get unearthed.

Nick’s character was just amazing.

I absolutely adored the dynamic between Mischa and Nick. They had so much love and support for one another.

I also loved that the book dived into teenage depression and mental health a bit. The author shows how the pressure of school, parents, and other aspects in a teenagers life can be too much, and what can happen as a result.

4.5 Stars

I went into this book knowing very little about it because I've literally heard no one talk about it, so i had zero expectations and I LOVED IT! I was interested in the story right away. The MC is driven and unapologetic about it. I absolutely ADORED her love interest who is bisexual and NOT PROBLEMATIC, GOD BLESS US EVERYONE! I ship them SO HARD! There's a female gang of hackers and 2 of them are in a relationship. It's everything! This book is funny, and enthralling, and I can't recommend it enough.

Mischa is going to college, not her safety local university, but to an ivy league school That was all true till she got a rejection letter from every college and university she applied. How could this have happened to Mischa who has done everything right, even down to joining every club possible to pad her resume. We Regret to Inform You is a humorous look into how Mischa solves what happen to all her applications.

I liked this one. I liked the mystery aspect of it and how Mischa had to lose herself to find her true self. I thought it was well written but I just thought it was missing something. I did like the bi best friend character and how they progressed throughout the book.

Rating: 4.5 Stars

This was the moment, when it was all supposed to payoff. This was the reward for all her hard work, sleepless nights, and her mother's financial sacrifice so that she could attend a top notch private high school. High SAT scores - check! Near perfect GPA (curse you freshman PE!) - check! A long list of leadership and club positions - check! Mischa was a dream on paper, but as everyone began celebrating their college acceptances, she received NONE.

This was one of my anticipated reads for this year, and it did not let me down. I throughly enjoyed Kaplan's debut, Grendel's Guide to Love and War, and therefore expected a story full or humor and heart. Not only did Kaplan deliver an often hilarious tale of senior year woe, but she also really took a hard look at the weight of expectations and the pressures that most high school students face.

Many times, overachievers are portrayed as a little bit cutthroat, but that was not the case with Mischa. When we first met her, she was secure and confident in her abilities. Yes, she was over extended to some degree, but she had a great sense of humor and a friendly demeanor. I had no problem liking her, and when things took a turn for the worst, I had no problem sharing her pain.

Mischa was lucky to have a stupendous best friend in Nate. He always seemed to have time for Mischa or made time for her. I loved the ease of their friendship and the support he gave to her. Nate was a lot more complex, than I originally anticipated, and I thought his backstory, which was slowly revealed, was an important part of Mischa's journey.

And that brings me to the part I always appreciate in YA books, the main character's journey of self discovery. Mischa's whole life plan sort of went up in smoke. Without the Ivy League acceptance letter in her hand, she had no idea who she was or what she could be. It was sort of sad to think, that people see themselves as grades and scores, but most of us were once there, and could therefore, totally relate to Mischa's identity crisis.

I thought that was all this book was going to be about, but after all the rejections were received, a mystery began to unfold, the mystery of who sabotaged Mischa's college admissions. The whole Scooby thing with the Ophelia Syndicate was a lot of fun. How could I not love a sassy trio of stem loving girls. In addition to helping Mischa uncover the truth about her admissions failures, they also helped her see beyond "Mischa the Overachiever" and see Mischa the person.

The mystery was filled with all the delicious drama that I was expecting. It also contained plenty of social commentary there, and I liked the way multiple characters added to the exploration of "what comes next". I always bothered me, that college is made to seem like the only after high school option, and it was refreshing to see other options mentioned.

Overall: This was a wonderful mixture of comedy, drama, and mystery with a touch of romance, that thoughtfully explored many of the pressures associated with the standard ideas of achievement.

This is a fun mystery about a girl named Mischa who has been attending an exclusive private high school on scholarships and loans in hopes that she will be able to get into a good college and not have to work as hard as her single mother does. All of that comes crashing down when, in spite of all her good grades, test scores, extracurricular activities and letters of recommendation, she doesn't get into her college of choice. Or any of the other good schools. Or even the school of last resort. Mischa starts questioning a lot of things, including why she's been doing all the things she's been doing. It's a lovely story of self discovery.

Mystery, drama, romance, humor, identity crisis. A little bit o' everything. An fun read sure to snag teen readership.

I enjoyed this book very much! It was funny, sweet, and had a great high-tech mystery. It all felt very current, even if the secret plot is a little far-fetched. The character of Caroline seemed somewhat unnecessary, but other that, I liked the characters. Overall, I'll be recommending this to US readers.