Alice and David are worried parents. Are their children falling behind with their schoolwork, their music lessons and the number of sleepover invitations received this month? Or are all those extra lessons causing them to miss out on physical exercise? Maybe they could find a maths tutor who'd be prepared to swim alongside them and explain binary numbers while the children practise their breast-stroke?
This permanent sense of crisis is coming to a climax as their eldest child looks set to fail her entrance exam for the hallowed school on which they have pinned all their hopes. Many mothers can't help wanting to do everything for their children, but Alice takes this maternal obsession one step further. She takes the test in place of her daughter. A baseball cap pulled low over her face, she shuffles into a hall of two hundred kids and faces her first examination for twenty years. But it is only once she puts herself in the place of one of her children that she starts to understand the sort of exhausting pressures they have been under . . .
