3.5 stars. I liked how the story followed the main character through her time in high school and I thought she seemed very authentic. I felt like overall the book seemed to be missing something to kind of tie everything together though; it didn't really feel like a cohesive novel and there were some storylines that didn't really make sense or contribute much to the book as a whole.

I found this book very difficult to get into. The story follows the main character, Lee Fiora, as she spends four years at Ault, an exclusive boarding school, after successfully applying there on a scholarship, despite her parents' concerns. Lee is difficult to like and to empathise with. Yes, she has to integrate with other students from wealthy backgrounds and to put up with a certain amount of bitchiness due to her naivety in a new environment, but I couldn't understand how she thought this entitled her to avoid studying and almost invite scenarios to flunk her subjects.

Equally difficult to understand was Lee's attitude towards the other students. She almost refuses to fit in despite being offered, on a number of occasions, opportunities to make friends. She shuns these with an almost lazy acceptance of the fact that she is 'different' so will always have to stand apart from the rest of the alumni. She certainly didn't endear herself to me.

Apart from her 'romance' with Cross Sugarman; a very one sided affair where she allows him to treat her with a cavalier disdain, and a friendship with her room mate, Martha, Lee has a very miserable time, largely due to her inability to help herself which I found very frustrating.

The second half of the book improved on the first as the pace developed leading up to an interesting climax, and saved the book for me. However, I never got to like Lee, who remained a bit of a moaner and allowed herself to remain a victim throughout.

On the plus side.

It's compulsively readable, even when you want to reach in and strangle the angst-ridden, preternaturally detached, protagonist.

On the minus side.

After a while, you just want to reach in and strangle the angst-ridden, preternaturally detached, protagonist.

Full disclosure: My high school years were spent at a Catholic boarding school. The first year away from home was miserable. I'm familiar with detachment as a survival mechanism, but Lee Fiora, the protagonist of "Prep" brings it to incredibly irritating, and ultimately implausible, new lows.

This is probably the longest I've ever spent trying to finish a book. Lee, the main character from whose point of view it is told, is completely unlikeable. She is frustrating, whiny, and immature. You just want to shake her. The book is separated by years and seasons, the first few of which you can understand where she's coming from and possibly relate to or atleast feel empathy. However, by her junior year, it becomes unbearable as she carries on about how miserable her life is, though she does nothing to change it.

More than her own self-pity, her secret hate and resentment of others, even her best friends, is at times hard to read. She must just get so sick of judging herself that she decides to spread a little of her self-loathing to those around her, whether or not that person ever did anything wrong to Lee, who takes everthing so personal. Seriously, if you hiccupped in her presence, she'd probably think it was because you were trying to contain your laughter over her outfit.

Then, out of nowhere Lee actually starts DOING something, and the chapters about her senior year become unneccessarily and to be honest, disgustingly graphic, describing her dysfunctional relationship. I'll never have that image of a dirty tan wool sweater out of my head.

But she never figures it out. She doesn't change at all, even years later, as she so bitterly reflects on it. By the end, you realize that the ball really is in one's own court; your life is what you make it. In Lee's case, she didn't make too much of it in high school.

Romantic Comedy was definitely one of my Top 5 reads in 2023, and I knew I would be returning to the works of Curtis Sittenfeld in short order. I love coming of age stories and love the idea of the goings on at some prestigious boarding school so it was easy to add this to the TBR. Little did I know this was going to be a first person experience that truly meanders through Lee Fiora’s four years at Ault. If you are of the DNF ilk, you will know right away this probably isn’t for you. And I wouldn’t blame you at all for putting it down because not a whole lot happens aside from residing in Lee’s head and dormitory room for hundreds upon hundreds of pages. It reads very much “MFA” course, which typically I can’t stand, but for some reason I became invested and kept on keeping on. I can’t say I would ever recommend this one, but I don’t regret reading it and I’ll definitely get around to Sisterland one of these days.

amava esse livro quando era adolescente, foi muito bom reler e continuar amando. tava sem conseguir ler direito, sem engajar com outros livros, então foi ótimo entrar nesse ritmo de leitura de novo.

I realize this book was published in 2005, but it still resonates today and will continue for years to come. Ms. Sittenfeld really understands the teenage mind, cluttered with all its angst, hormones, daily trials of emotions, social indignities to the masses, etc. and on and on. Just every little nuance is covered. The extra drama is so part of the angst. Nothing is missed in this novel about what kids go through in high school, particularly boarding school. The division between the classes is still very apparent and stretches through to the parental units as well. Praise for the book because she gets it right as we are entertained while reading. She finally realizes that what happened back in HS doesn't define you, nor is it really important 20-30 years in the future. But teenagers can never understand that. Just so happy I'm through it and so are my children. Great job.

ETA DECEMBER 2023... This book HOLDS TF UP!!!!

I could not stop reading this book. I have never read anything that left me feeling so much like I was looking in a mirror—not because I went to prep school, but because the bizarre anxiety of having some money, but not a lot of money, around people who have buckets of money, is so rarely articulated as well as it is here. Lee is a frustrating protagonist, but I think I have more sympathy for her than most, mainly because she is such a keen observer, and so much of what she observes rings so true. I don’t know. It hit me hard. One of those books I never wanted to end, because I felt like I was living in it.

Also, there are some really great lines—the prose is very clean and pleasant to read, but not too easy, and, you know, I’ll say it again: It’s relatable. It just is. Anyway, I highlighted the fuck out of this thing. Ugh.

Let me first admit that "Prep" was far from perfect. I’m not sure I could argue against many of the bad reviews. At times, I longed for the novel to hurry along. The foreshadowing was clunky. Occasionally I was so bored I wasn't sure I could get through the entire novel.

And then (heavy sigh), Sittenfeld did what I hadn’t imagined anyone could do. She made me relive the most painful experiences of high school with such honesty that it was hard to believe that she wrote the book as an adult. I was astonished that she was able to remember exactly how many of these situations felt with such vividness and sincerity. Suddenly, with crushing intensity, I remembered how maddeningly frustrated I would become with my parents, how ill at ease I would feel in the presence of a beautiful, popular girl, or how devastated I was over bad crush. The magic of “Prep” is that none of this ever becomes a cliché. Sittenfeld doesn't reduce the experiences or simplify them, the way most shows, novels, and movies about high school do. She doesn’t take the abilities and desires of an adult and try to stuff them into teenage bodies. Sittenfeld is able to portray that inconsequential events have the weight of lead during adolescence. And, most amazingly, Sittenfeld does this without trying to make everything better--to make the protagonist more self-aware or to balm over her misery.

Rating the book with five stars is not a recommendation. The book made me feel awful. I cringed in discomfort, I felt humiliated over events I hadn’t thought of in years, I had nightmares about high school boyfriends.

But my heart raced when Lee felt a victory, and my stomach dropped when she experienced a defeat. How often, as a reader, can one truly say that they understood exactly how something felt?

I feel embarrassed even saying this, but I felt that I had to give “Prep” five stars because, to not do so, I would be denying that it affected me in a meaningful way.

A for Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaangst
Prep, a story told by the talented Curtis Sittenfeld, was hard to put down. The narrator, Lee Fiora, an unremarkable girl from South Bend, Indiana, does a remarkable thing. At 13 she decides to apply to East Coast Prep schools and winds up spending an angst-ridden four years at Ault School just outside of Boston, Mass.

("How was I supposed to understand, when I applied at the age of thirteen, that you have your whole life to leave your family?")

This is the story of EVERYTHING that goes on inside her head. The quote above is just one example. It's all about observation and laying bare the atmosphere that is Prep School as experienced by an outsider. And this outsider believed herself to be "a petty, angry, impotent person."

Lee outlines her memories by grade level, (freshman, sophomore, junior, senior) and focuses on major and minor events shaping each year. The detail is both exquisite and annoyingly sharp and pulls you into each scene as though it's happening in the now rather than some 20 years ago. It's personal and revealing and I can't imagine anyone who didn't experience at least some of the same thoughts during high school--no matter what school or what place.

Freshman year it's all about roommates and assimilating to what is for Lee a foreign climate. It's also the year where she first develops a crush on a golden boy named Cross Sugarman. Other students, Dede and Martha, for example, use their time at Ault to get the education they were promised; however, Lee--an average to poor student--spends all her time fantasizing about Cross. As the years sail by, Lee learns to deal with all things associated with coming of age, except for what it truly means to fit in.

Great storytelling, tremendous character development, extremely well written and I highly recommend this book. I have to say it reminded me a little bit of four years at Hogwarts, without the wizardry, of course, and a heroine who unlike Harry Potter, wasn't popular and had no self-confidence.

Again, I was shocked by the reviews after hopping on Goodreads. Only this time, I loved it and yet, there were so many haters. Can't a girl get a break? Am I forever doomed to be the outsider? Okay, a little overly dramatic, to be sure. There are MANY more who seemed to have enjoyed it than despised it, but the haters were hanging out at the top of the reviews, so that made it seem worse than the reality.

Yes, I loved Prep...shoot me. I always wanted to go to boarding school. I, in fact, used to fantasize about it on frequent basis. My parents would threaten me with sending me to boarding school when I didn't tow the line and I was always like, 'yes, please!' I should have known better. NEVER show enthusiasm for the "punishment"...a life lesson that I should have picked up from Brer Rabbit.

Well, unfortunately, I never got to go to prep school, but I still like to fantasize about it from time to time, and this book certainly fit the bill. Teen angst is nothing if not entertaining. As Stephen King said, "If you liked being a teenager, there's something really wrong with you." Totally.

Well...
This book isn't getting five stars because I thought it was a literary masterpiece. It's getting them because it's the first boarding school narrative I've read (ever) that is indicative of the actual experience, or at least my actual experience. Other books (fiction) on the subject, such as Black Ice or Oh the Glory of it All, tend to stick to one of two slants: 1) the narrator is from a poor family, gets a scholarship, and his/her has a wonderful life from boarding school on, filled with rich experiences and admittance to Harvard, and never goes back to the ghetto; 2) the narrator is from an extremely wealthy and extremely fucked-up family, escapes to boarding school, where s/he becomes vastly more fucked up, frolicking with the other rich, debauched fuckups, with the superevil family lurking in the background of each page. Prep didn't follow any of these, and admittedly, I liked it so much because it mirrored my experience.
But that's not why while reading it on a flight across the continent; somewhere above Colorado I looked up and realized I was crying. Hard. What made me cry was the memory of some of the feelings that Sittenfield describes, things that are so acute and so very particular to being away from home, in that environment, at that age. Some quotes:

"How was I supposed to understand, when I applied at the age of thirteen, that you have your whole life to leave your family? Or maybe it was going to Ault that had turned me into the kind of person who would always, for reasons of schooling, then work, stay away."

"When you go to boarding school, you're always leaving your family, not once but over and over and over, and it's not like it is when you're in college because you're older then and you're sort of supposed to be gone from them. I cried because of how guilty I felt, and because of how indulgent my guilt was...I missed them so much I was tempted to call my mother and ask her to come wait with me for the plane; she'd have done it. But then she'd know what she'd probably only suspected -- how messed up I really was, how much I'd been misleading them for the last four years. It would be much better...back on campus. But while I was in their city, it just seemed like such a mistake that I had ever left home, such an error in judgement on all our parts."


"This was what the rest of the world was like...Hardly ever did it matter if you brushed your hair before driving to the grocery store, rarely did you work in an office where you cared what more than two or three people thought of you. At Ault, caring about everything was draining, but it was also exhilarating."

"No crush is worse than a boarding school crush; college is bigger and more diluted, and in the office, at least you get a break from each other at night."


"Ault had taught me everything I needed to know about attracting and alienating people, what the exact measurements ought to be of confidence and self deprecation, humour, disclosure, inquisitiveness; even, finally, of enthusiasm. Also, Ault had been the toughest audience I'd ever encounter, to the extent that sometimes afterward, I found winning people over disappointingly easy."