Book review: Sandra Tsing Loh's memoir 'Mother on Fire'

Should they send their spawn to private school or public? Pay the exorbitant tuition that will sequester them amongst the children of the monied and educated or pay nothing and throw them to the wolves with the kids of the working class?

So many decisions. All of them frustrating.

Sandra Tsing Loh has been there. She's also been quite vocal about her experience. The public radio commentator, performance artist and writer has talked about it on the air. She's performed it in a one-woman show. And she's written about it. And written about it. And written about it, most recently -- and thoroughly -- in her new memoir, "Mother on Fire."

Until 2004, Loh was a marginally famous humorist. Then she "exploded into flames," as she writes on the book's opening page, transforming herself into the foaming mouthpiece of dissent and outrage over the state of public education in the U.S. Loh was 42 at the time -- a working and married mother of two young girls who was on the prowl for a good kindergarten.

Ask any educated, middle-class parent in L.A. who happened to buy real estate in a neighborhood with low-scoring public schools: It ain't easy. Loh lives in "the Nuys," a.k.a. Van Nuys, but it could be almost anywhere in this sprawling megalopolis that 12 million of us call home. Loh's local elementary school is populated with students who have yet to learn English. The lawn that rings the facility "isn't emerald-green lush" but "hairy, weedy, leathery crabgrass that is much like Don King's hair."

Loh's story is the classic comic tragedy of L.A. She's famous but not famous enough for her children to be granted access to the most premium of schools. Even if her daughters had been waved through in a puff of magic fairy dust, she and her musician husband wouldn't have been able to afford the $20,000-plus annual tuition per child per year -- and that's just for kindergarten. That fee would likely double for high school.

So off Loh goes with her husband, braving the wilds of the woolly Los Angeles Unified School District -- a beast so foul it often inspires tears. In Loh's comedically gifted hands, however, LAUSD is also hugely entertaining as Loh attaches herself to alpha mothers who are trying to game the system and does her own research into just how bad the system really is.