Accelerated

In this striking debut novel, a single father and his son discover what lies beneath the gilded façade of a tony Upper East Side private school: an epidemic of over-medicated children.

Every afternoon Sean Benning picks up his son, Toby, on the marble steps that lead into the prestigious Bradley School. Everything at Bradley is accelerated: Third-graders read at the sixth-grade level, students have labs and facilities to rival most universities, and the chess champions are the bullies. Sean, a struggling artist, sticks out like a sore thumb amongst the power-soccer-mom cliques and ladies-who-lunch who congregate on the steps every afternoon. But at least Toby is thriving and getting the best education money can buy. Or is he?

When Sean starts getting pressure from the school to put Toby on medication for ADD, something smells fishy, and it isn’t the caviar that was served at last week’s PTA meeting. Toby’s “issues” in school seem, to Sean, to be nothing more than normal behavior for an eight-year-old boy. But maybe Sean just isn’t seeing things clearly—which as been harder to do since Toby’s attractive, kind new teacher, Jess, started at Bradley. The school has Toby’s best interests at heart, doesn't it? But what happens when the pressure to excel takes hold? As things takes a deadly turn, Sean realizes that the price of this accelerated pace is higher than he could have ever imagined.

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