Serious and bookish, Caroline Tompkins never imagined becoming an elementary school principal. Her memoir reveals an improbable fifteen-year journey running two schools in her hometown, a place where the American Dream meets the social politics of the borderlands. This principal's personal story exposes the inner workings of a job crucial to our nation, but a job in turmoil just below its hearty and earnest surface. Principal brings to life the swirl of a single day in the spring of her final year on the job, a day in which conversations and crises, children and adults, missteps and small...