Curtis Sittenfeld’s debut novel, Prep, is an insightful, achingly funny coming-of-age story as well as a brilliant dissection of class, race, and gender in a hothouse of adolescent angst and ambition.
Lee Fiora is an intelligent, observant fourteen-year-old when her father drops her off in front of her dorm at the prestigious Ault School in Massachusetts. She leaves her animated, affectionate … animated, affectionate family in South Bend, Indiana, at least in part because of the boarding school’s glossy brochure, in which boys in sweaters chat in front of old brick buildings, girls in kilts hold lacrosse sticks on pristinely mown athletic fields, and everyone sings hymns in chapel.
As Lee soon learns, Ault is a cloistered world of jaded, attractive teenagers who spend summers on Nantucket and speak in their own clever shorthand. Both intimidated and fascinated by her classmates, Lee becomes a shrewd observer of — and, ultimately, a participant in — their rituals and mores. As a scholarship student, she constantly feels like an outsider and is both drawn to and repelled by other loners. By the time she’s a senior, Lee has created a hard-won place for herself at Ault. But when her behavior takes a self-destructive and highly public turn, her carefully crafted identity within the community is shattered.
Ultimately, Lee’s experiences — complicated relationships with teachers; intense friendships with other girls; an all-consuming preoccupation with a classmate who is less than a boyfriend and more than a crush; conflicts with her parents, from whom Lee feels increasingly distant, coalesce into a singular portrait of the painful and thrilling adolescence universal to us all.
BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Curtis Sittenfeld’s Sisterland.
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This is a coming-of-age novel about Lee Fiora, who leaves her loving family in small-town Indiana to go to an expensive boarding school in Massachusetts. Going to boarding school has been Lee’s dream, but when she arrives she finds she doesn’t fit in. The school is a minefield of social hierarchy and the sort of pecking order only teenagers …
This book makes my top 10 list. I adore coming-of-age stories, which this is, but man do I admire an author who can deliver the ugly parts with such raw emotion that you feel like you’re right back there going through it all again. This one is very real, and it’s relatable. This book makes me want to dig deeper and write the hard stuff.
I was really disappointed by this book. Normally I love Curtis Sittenfeld and I’d had this book recommended to me by so many people but I just couldn’t get into it. Prep tells the story of Lee Fiora, a thirteen year old girl who wins a scholarship to an ultra-elite boarding school. It covers her entire high school experience and is pitched as a …
The book its self was ok. It made me think about when I was a kid and had wanted to go to boarding school. It also made me consider if I would ever allow my daughter to go to one. There were many times that I felt like I could understand what Lee was going through, and my heart hurt for her. There were other times, like in most tween stories that …
Great writing about high school angst in a prep school setting. It is painful to remember those thoughts, when you thought you were the only one experiencing feeling less-than others/loneliness/trying to fit in etc…