Fat Envelope Frenzy: One Year, Five Promising Students, and the Pursuit of the Ivy League Prize (Harper), by Joie Jager-Hyman, formerly an admissions officer at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, is a new book that portrays the emotional roller-coaster of the college application process.

One of the five students whom Jager-Hyman tracks in the book ultimately enrolls at Harvard. One decides to take a year off to train for the Olympics. The others attend Brandeis, Princeton, and Washington and Lee.

Jager-Hyman herself is now back in school. A doctoral candidate at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, she is studying low-income teenagers in Baltimore who are in the thick of applying to college.

— The Boston Globe