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.
Praise for *Prep
*
"Curtis Sittenfeld is a young writer with a crazy amount of talent. Her
sharp and economical prose reminds us of Joan Didion and Tobias Wolff.
Like them, she has a sly and potent wit, which cuts unexpectedly--but
often--through the placid surface of her prose. Her voice is strong and
clear, her moral compass steady; I'd believe anything she told
me."--Dave Eggers, author of *A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering
Genius
*
"Speaking in a voice as authentic as Salinger's Holden Caulfield and
McCullers' Mick Kelly, Curtis Sittenfeld's Lee Fiora tells unsugared
truths about adolescence, alienation, and the sociology of privilege.
Prep's every sentence rings true. Sittenfeld is a rising
star."--Wally Lamb, author of She's Come Undone and I Know This
Much Is True
