Book Review: Rush | Lisa Patton

Heart-warming, emotional, and thought-provoking…Rush is not what I expected—it is better! I’ve always been fascinated by the Greek system. My own undergraduate didn’t have a Greek system, so who knows if I would have rushed a sorority myself, but I am intellectually and socially intrigued by the whole process. I started this book knowing I’d like it—who wouldn’t? Sorority rushing, an old southern legacy campus, teenage girls putting their hearts on the line for a welcome into a social system they’ll have their whole lives. Who wouldn’t love that? But Rush is very much more than a book about sororities. It is a book about race, class, family, sisterhood, and the search for respect and belonging. I encourage everyone to go out and read this book! You won’t regret it!

About the Book

A new rush season has settled in upon the Alpha Delta Beta house on the historic Ole Miss campus in Oxford, Mississippi. House Corp President Lilith Whitmore finds herself unable to be a rush advisor due to her position, and with a daughter set to begin sorority rush this fall. When Lilith appoints her old sorority sister Wilda Wilcox to the Rush Advisory Board, Wilda can’t say no. Her own daughter Ellie will be rushing at Ole Miss this fall as well, and Wilda finds herself on the precipice of an empty nest. She’ll do anything to stay involved with her only daughter’s life.

Ellie Wilcox and Lilith’s daughter Annie Laurie are both legacies at Alpha Delta Beta, meaning their mothers were members. Lilith coordinates for them to room together, and Wilda thinks this may be the final push Ellie needs to get a bid from Alpha Delta Beta. But Ellie rooming with Annie Laurie has it’s own problems—Wilda begins to understand the true implications of wealth and status in the south, and she and Ellie may not be able to keep up.

Cali Watkins lives in the dorm room next door to Ellie and Annie Laurie. Cali is smart, hard-working, and has a big heart—spending her time caring for those around her. She’s everything a sorority should want in a member. But she doesn’t have a pedigree. Cali’s family is full of secrets and scandal—the one thing that could prevent her from getting into a sorority. But all Cali wants is to find sisters of her own and belong, and she enters rush hoping no one finds out about her mother.

Miss Pearl has been the housekeeper for Alpha Delta Beta for over twenty years, ever since she had to drop out of Ole Miss Herself at nineteen. Miss Pearl is black in a nearly all-white sorority. But Miss Pearl loves her job and her babies in the house. When an opportunity becomes available to be even more involved with Alpha Delta Beta, Miss Pearl knows that the color of her skin may prevent her one again from the life she’s earned.

Can these powerful women change a social system that prioritizes status and skin color over substance of character??

Reflection

At the core of this book is a conversation about what it means to have respect and trust from others, and what it means to belong. I recently was reading a book about a person’s reputation being a form of social currency, and that reputation can give someone advantages that someone without that reputation may not be able to get. Some people, like the wealthy and high-society members of this book have a built in reputation from their status in life. But others that came in with nothing—Cali and Miss Pearl—were able to build that reputation by strength of character, kindness, and trustworthiness. I felt inspired seeing that reputation in this book looked superficial at the outside, but the book really ended up being about people caring more about who you are than where you come from.

The book is told from three narrators, and what I loved about that was we had three different social subgroups of the larger Alpha Delta Beta social system. Wilda connects us to the legacy of ADB, and the previous generation of sisters. Wilda, though decades out of her time at the sorority, still feels insecure and desires to fit in with the perceived status members of the group. Though Wilda doesn’t really even like Lilith, she is desperate for Lilith to accept her. She wants to feel like she beautiful enough, wealthy enough, and classy enough to deserve Lilith’s friendship. But Wilda herself has something Lilith doesn’t—kindness and morals, and people who love her despite what she may or may not have.

Then we have Miss Pearl. Oh, how I loved Miss Pearl! Miss Pearl is our portal into the primarily-black support staff of the house. The people who feel happy just to be a part of the system, even as the lowest ranking members. There was such a pureness to Miss Pearl. She didn’t begrudge others for having more than her, but she had the self-respect and confidence to stand up for what she wants as well. Through Miss Pearl, we see that despite all of the progress we think we have made for racial equality, there are still so many opportunities that aren’t equal or fair. I can’t imagine a reader on this planet who won’t love Miss Pearl, and cheer her on throughout this book.

And finally we have Cali leading the charge as our window into the new generation of sorority rushees. It would be so easy for this book to be critical of sororities—portraying the girls as vapid or shallow. But what we see is that all of the shallowness of sororities exists only to outsiders. Every girl in this book struggled to belong to a sisterhood for the purpose of support and friendship, not for status. The generation of girls in Alpha Delta Beta were such wonderful characters. Cali herself has a strength and a vulnerability that is charming. As Cali befriends Ellie, we see that Ellie herself is more impressed by someone’s character than their status. Ellie, in fact, is the one that shows her mother Wilda how much Wilda’s own values were in the right place. How Wilda passed to Ellie a sense of kindness, not elitism, despite Wilda’s own insecurities.

I read this with my friend Berit and one thing Berit said that resonated with me was that these were characters she would miss as soon as she stopped reading this book. I whole-heartedly agree with her! I feel completely in love with these women and I won’t soon forget them or the message of this book. I hope others enjoy it as much as I did! See Berit’s review over at her blog, Audio Killed the Bookmark!