Radio commentator and performer Loh (A Year in Van Nuys
) has penned a hilarious memoir with the same title as her one-woman comedy show, which ran for seven months in Los Angeles. The story begins as a droll little breeze that soon sucks the reader into a frenzied whirlwind as Loh recounts her harrowing quest to find a suitable kindergarten for Hannah, her four-year-old daughter (Loh habitually calls Isabel, her two-year-old, simply “The Squid”). Spurned by the local Lutheran school (which deems the precocious Hannah “not developmentally ready”), Loh vaults from pricey and competitive private institutions to public school settings, discovering that the chances of Hannah making it into the desirable public magnet school are minuscule, and only one in 20 is admitted to the idyllic private school, “Wonder Canyon,” which costs $22,500 per year. Loh is prone to insomnia, expletives (she's fired from her radio spot for using the F word on air), panic (“panic attacks are my booster rockets”) and exaggeration as she grapples with rejection, middle age, friendship, a clueless but lovable guitar-playing husband and a brilliant but eccentric Chinese father. All parents who have searched for an ideal school for their youngster (and even those who haven't) will be snared by Loh's crackling prose. (Aug.)
