Prep - a novel

Curtis Sittenfeld?s debut novel, Prep, is an insightful, achingly funn y 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 h er off in front of her dorm at the prestigious Ault School in Massachu setts. She leaves her animated, affectionate family in South Bend, Ind iana, at least in part because of the boarding school?s glossy brochur e, in which boys in sweaters chat in front of old brick buildings, gir ls in kilts hold lacrosse sticks on pristinely mown athletic fields, a nd everyone sings hymns in chapel. As Lee soon learns, Ault is a clois tered world of jaded, attractive teenagers who spend summers on Nantuc ket and speak in their own clever shorthand. Both intimidated and fasc inated by her classmates, Lee becomes a shrewd observer of?and, ultima tely, a participant in?their rituals and mores. As a scholarship stude nt, she constantly feels like an outsider and is both drawn to and rep elled by other loners. By the time she?s a senior, Lee has created a h ard-won place for herself at Ault. But when her behavior takes a self- destructive and highly public turn, her carefully crafted identity wit hin the community is shattered.Ultimately, Lee?s experiences?complicat ed relationships with teachers; intense friendships with other girls; an all-consuming preoccupation with a classmate who is less than a boy friend and more than a crush; conflicts with her parents, from whom Le e feels increasingly distant, coalesce into a singular portrait of the painful and thrilling adolescence universal to us all.

(Seelig)