This hilarious novel of a helicopter mom and dad is "a near-flawless caricature of 21st-century upper-middle-class parenthood" ( Publishers Weekly). Alice never imagined she would end up like this, so anxious after hearing about the dangers of meteorites that she makes her children wear bike helmets in the wading pool. Her husband, David, has taught their four-year-old to list every animal represented in Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf. But the more they push their children, the more things there are to worry about. It seems no amount of gluten rationing or herbal teas can improve their children's intellectual development, and as Alice's eldest child looks set to fail her entrance exam for the exclusive private school on which her parents have pinned all their hopes, Alice decides to take matters into her own hands. With a baseball cap pulled low over her face, Alice shuffles into a hall of two hundred kids and takes the test in place of her daughter, her first exam in twenty years. From one of Britain's bestselling comic novelists, praised by the New York Times for "a tart narrative voice and a delectably understated way with wisecracks," May Contain Nuts is a provocative satire of the manic world of today's hypercompetitive, overprotective families.

ジョン・オファレルは教育という狂気に憑かれた中流階級を、毒気のあるユーモアで鮮やかに解剖します。本作は、子供の成功で己の空虚を埋める親の滑稽さと孤独を暴く社会風刺の傑作です。完璧を求め迷走する母アリスの姿は、読者に苦笑いと深い内省を促します。 実写版がなりすまし受験の喜劇性を強調する一方、原作は緻密な心理描写で親の焦燥を肌身に迫る恐怖として描きます。映像で狂騒を楽しみ、本でその心理的深淵を覗く。この相乗効果こそが競争社会の不条理を立体化し、読者の心を激しく揺さぶるのです。