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Overview
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 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.
Synopsis
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 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 adolescenceuniversal to us all.
From the Hardcover edition.
The Washington Post - Caitlin macy
In a memorable passage near the opening of Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh's narrator, Charles Ryder, reflects on how "easy" it is, "retrospectively, to endow one's youth with a false precocity or false innocence." The same double-edged temptation often derails first-time novelists, who end up enervating the protagonist-version of themselves with one or the other pretension. Not, however, Curtis Sittenfeld, whose gripping debut effort, Prep, gives us a more accurate picture of adolescence as an unlovely mix of utter cluelessness, extreme sensitivity and untempered drives.
Editorials
The New Yorker
Any feelings of nostalgia for adolescence should be dispelled by the exacting intimacies of this first novel. Lee Fiora, a scholarship student at the prestigious Ault School (not Ault Academy, as her parents embarrassingly refer to it), negotiates her days there in a blaze of self-consciousness that is, by turns, hilarious and excruciating: “I believed then that if you had a good encounter with a person, it was best not to see them again for as long as possible.” And yet she becomes an expert on the rituals that govern the rarefied microenvironment in which she finds herself: the students’ fondness for catchphrases like “therein lies the paradox” and “LMC” (lower middle class); the taboo against enthusiasm for anything other than sports; the fact that the school always sings “God be with you till we meet again” at chapel before breaks. In the end, Lee’s incisive vision of herself and others is her downfall but also—as this richly textured narrative suggests—her greatest gift.Caitlin macy
In a memorable passage near the opening of Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh's narrator, Charles Ryder, reflects on how "easy" it is, "retrospectively, to endow one's youth with a false precocity or false innocence." The same double-edged temptation often derails first-time novelists, who end up enervating the protagonist-version of themselves with one or the other pretension. Not, however, Curtis Sittenfeld, whose gripping debut effort, Prep, gives us a more accurate picture of adolescence as an unlovely mix of utter cluelessness, extreme sensitivity and untempered drives.— The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly
A self-conscious outsider navigates the choppy waters of adolescence and a posh boarding school's social politics in Sittenfeld's A-grade coming-of-age debut. The strong narrative voice belongs to Lee Fiora, who leaves South Bend, Ind., for Boston's prestigious Ault School and finds her sense of identity supremely challenged. Now, at 24, she recounts her years learning "everything I needed to know about attracting and alienating people." Sittenfeld neither indulges nor mocks teen angst, but hits it spot on: "I was terrified of unwittingly leaving behind a piece of scrap paper on which were written all my private desires and humiliations. The fact that no such scrap of paper existed... never decreased my fear." Lee sees herself as "one of the mild, boring, peripheral girls" among her privileged classmates, especially the Uber-popular Aspeth Montgomery, "the kind of girl about whom rock songs were written," and Cross Sugarman, the boy who can devastate with one look ("my life since then has been spent in pursuit of that look"). Her reminiscences, still youthful but more wise, allow her to validate her feelings of loneliness and misery while forgiving herself for her lack of experience and knowledge. The book meanders on its way, light on plot but saturated with heartbreaking humor and written in clean prose. Sittenfeld, who won Seventeen's fiction contest at 16, proves herself a natural in this poignant, truthful book. Agent, Shana Kelly. (Jan. 18) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.VOYA
Prep is a gently told novel of Lee Fiora's four years at prestigious, private Ault (High) School, to which, after applying on a lark, she gets a scholarship. A big fish in South Bend, Indiana, she is invisible at Ault. But why? Is it the dichotomy between her "LMC" (lower middle class) upbringing and the elite "bank boys" and coeds of extremely rich families or does Lee refuse to fit in? In her soft voice, Lee recounts incidents from each semester, weaving in her pre-Ault and post-graduation life. She tells of her four-year crush on fellow student Cross Sugarman, former roommate Sin Jun's aspirin overdose suicide attempt, Lee almost being a junior-year casualty of Ault's "spring cleaning" because she is failing pre-calculus, and a disastrous New York Times interview just prior to graduation. Throughout, Martha, Lee's best friend and roommate, is the voice of reason and largely responsible for Lee's survival at Ault. This adult-marketed novel is well written and realistic. Everyone, regardless of age, will know someone who is Lee. Readers will root for her, be frustrated by her passivity, angry at her illusions regarding Cross's feelings, and sorry that her invisibility, a cry for help as loud as Sin Jun's, was either not heard or ignored by school staff. The contrast between Lee's sheltered life and other students' growth is evident. Lee's parents, like many, never read the signs of her discontent. Of interest to high school and college students and their parents, Prep should be in high school and public libraries. VOYA CODES: 4Q 4P S A/YA (Better than most, marred only by occasional lapses; Broad general YA appeal; Senior High, defined as grades 10 to 12; Adult-marketed book recommendedfor Young Adults). 2005, Random House, 403p., Ages 15 to Adult.—Ed Goldberg