Warren Said:

Can someone please critique my UC admissions essays?

We Answered:

This might sound silly to bring up, but from what you wrote it appears you did not sleep for years.

"I pull a stack of three or four books and read them for hours "

"I then wedge my hand between my mattresses and carefully extract a small, blue diary. I write for hours more."

I suggest you rephrase these two ideas. The alleged duration of both activities combined does not add up, and it is a small thing, but something that makes you look silly in the end.

Other minor notes:

do not use contractions (referring to your other essay, "haven't") in a college essay

statements like "I was devouring chapter books at a rate that startled my teachers" is sensationalist, and constructs the image of your teachers being simpletons. They are not.

Your mother let you spend days (continuously) at another person's house? I do not think people believe this, and that what you meant to say was that you spent long periods of time each day consecutively at a friend's house. The reader is reluctant to believe your conception of time given your previous vagueness describing you incidentally spending all night for years not sleeping.

"She always carried two or three books in her purse, and I would spend days at a time at her house as we collaborated on stories, dreaming of seeing our words in print, bound between two perfect, white endpapers, our pen names - we decided on Rose Wright and Ruth Danhof - on the dust jacket. " Too many ideas, too long. There is no reason to go all Jonathon Swift on people if it sacrifices fluidity. The clause "we decided on Rose Wright..." interrupts the read and presents itself abruptly to the reader. I suggest rephrasing, or eliminating this nonessential detail. I do not think the ideas mesh together enough to keep them all in one sentence. The last part, "...our pen names..." does not seem to complete a sentence. You need a word, such as "with," to make this end properly in my opinion.

In all, it is a decent essay. I do not have any complaints about it really, I just enumerated some points you may (or may not) wish to consider that I think may improve your essay.