Disclosure: I received this book for advance review through Amazon Vine. I was not required to give a good or bad review but was asked to give my honest opinion of the book.

I wish that rather than advertising itself as a book about how to "parent for authentic success," this book was a little more open and upfront about just how specific and relatively small the actual audience for Levine's advice is. The advice in this book will be useless to you if you live in anything other than the elite upper middle class neighborhoods where "Tiger Moms" drive the standards and the public schools are above average. If your child is going to have to get through college on grants and loans and work study, or not go to college at all, you will similarly have no use for it. If you are worried about keeping the basics in your life afloat, juggling childcare and jobs and mortgage and increasing food bills while maintaining some sanity and quality of life, skip this book--it's simply not for you (or me, one of those plain old average Jills).

This book is not about parenting, it's about strategy in the increasingly vicious competition that is going on between the children of the upper middle class and the "one percent." So Levine's strategy is unorthodox in that she emphasizes ways to dial the pressure down, but that's still what this book is about. It does promise, after all, that this parenting method will lead to "authentic success." And while that success may mean Sarah Lawrence instead of Harvard, it's still going to mean a ranking private or top public college, a degree that leads to grad school and six figure income, and a big house in a subdivision. To get there, you have to start there, increasingly so in this economy.

One key example of how Levine assumes this background for her readers is the laissez-faire attitude about drugs and sexual activity. While it may be easy enough for the well-to-do to get a drug offense dismissed, or sweep a teen pregnancy or STD under the rug, for hard-working members of the working class and lower middle class who are striving to get into a good college and launch a career that takes them up the economic ladder a rung or two, it is can be simply devastating. If mumsy and dadsy don't have the money to make your problems go away, it's simply not something you can afford to risk.

Skip this book unless you're the kind of overwrought achievement obsessed upper middle class hyper-parent it is clearly most truly meant to assist.