For me, this was a perfect read to distract me from worrying. My focus narrowed right down to match the self-absorbed teenage protagonist's, and everything outside the book disappeared. Every now and then I came across sentences that described the inner life of a teenage girl so perfectly that I had to interrupt my husband to read them out loud:

"As a freshman, I had at times believed that if my sadness were intense enough, it would magnetically draw a handsome boy to my room to comfort me, and that had served as an incentive, when alone, to lie around and weep."

"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 lest you taint the previous interaction."

(I'm also noting things that resonate for me in our current world of 'stay home, stay healthy' - in this case, I started the book to cheer me up after an argument about my tendency to assume the worst, and came across this helpful sentence: "There was something in his shrug I envied - an ability to prevent misfortune by choosing not to anticipate it.")

This is a remarkable book. My high school experience was far from Lee’s, but the lucid way in which Sittenfeld describes adolescence is incredibly resonant, sometimes nauseatingly so. I’m glad I read it before beginning the Groton chapter of my life and I’m glad I didn’t read it when I was closer to high school.

I just re-read this book and wanted to include some notes.

Some people, when they find a book they really love, read slowly, deliberately. They don’t want the book to end—they want to prolong its life indefinitely. Not me. When I love something, I want it all and I want it fast. When I love a book the way I love this book, it’s a race to the end.

This book is for anyone who spent any fraction of high school obsessed with other people’s opinions and lives. It’s for anyone who has found socializing to be anxiety-producing. It’s for anyone who let indecision be a decision and anyone who would rather judge than participate. And it’s especially for anyone who looks back on high school and cringes at how they used to behave and think. It's good to grow.

If you floated through high school happily, this book probably isn’t for you.


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I discovered this book at the Strand Bookstore in NYC during a time when what I most wanted was to find myself in a book. And I did. And for this reason, among many others, Curtis Sittenfeld will always be one of my favorite authors.

Thank you, Curtis Sittenfeld, for helping me realize that I wasn't nearly as neurotic growing up as I thought I was. Perhaps growing up as a girl with a guy's name has made Curtis into a self-loathing, self-righteous, boring maniac...or maybe this was just a totally horrendous bullsh*t piece of fiction that had nothing to do with her childhood. Either way, I had to force myself to finish this book. It was about 300 pages too long because the other 116 or so pages were the only ones that made me want to do something other than go on a drinking binge. I'm not dissin' Miss Sittenfeld's view of boarding school; I freely admit I grew up as LMC as the next guy, and had no burning desire to put my parents in debt so I could spend four years of my life pretending to be rich. However, if I had run into Lee Fiora at any time during my high school years, I would have happily punched her in the face and told her to get some self-respect. Not that I was a bully, I was just so cheesed off by Lee that I found myself wanting to run this book over with my car. Repeatedly. I found the "reporter incident" to be unbelievably infuriating because it proved that every action of Lee's up to this point was fake. Get over yourself. I know high school was confusing, and scary, and lonely sometimes. And I know that sometimes girls (and even women) confuse sex with love. But, if you don't learn from your mistakes or your misguided concepts or realize that the world doesn't revolve around you, then you're never going to be happy, or have friends. I could go on about all the things I loathe about this book, but I'll stop here and let you read it for yourself. I have a copy if you want, and it only has slight tire damage.

The mom-and-pop market down the street from my apartment has a small bookshelf that functions like a change dish: take one, leave one, etc. One day, I picked up Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep because the cover art is fantastic, and I'm a sucker for coming-of-age novels.

And I'm so glad I did. Sittenfeld is unlike any writer I've seen. She has a particular brilliance for casually fleshing out social phenomena with dialogue that feels entirely natural, and she does this without compromising the severity of subjects that may make us uncomfortable.

Discussing race, gender, class, and sexuality through the eyes of a small town young woman who gets accepted into an elite boarding school on the East Coast, Prep manages to be the kind of work that's accessible to just about anyone precisely because every character in here is a full human being, warts and glitter and all.

There are no heroes or villains, just people grappling with themselves and each other from the vantage point of an ambitious, restless teenage girl who struggles to understand what she wants in the world and why she wants it.

The book is so good and flows so easily--while still challenging the reader--that it's made me want to peruse all of Sittenfeld's work. What could be a better result for a writer?

Curtis Sittenfeld popped up on my radar after I read two of her stories in The New Yorker - Gender Studies & The Prairie Wife. She's got a book of collected short stories coming out next year - too long for me to wait - so I decided to give this novel a try. I'm glad I did, though I suspect it's not for everyone.

Here we have the tale of Lee Fiora, a Midwestern girl on her own at a hoity-toity East coast prep school. Much of Lee's experiences are universal, and shared by young adults at any school - the difficulty of finding and keeping friends, maintaining one's grades, and trying to shuffle through those awkward teenage years with one shred of dignity intact. Lee's travails, however, are complicated by the fact that she has to share room and board with her classmates. There is never really any down time when she can escape from them.

This bit really struck a chord with me. I can't imagine how I would have suffered the agonies of high school without a room of my own; a solitary haven filled with my books, my magazines, and my record albums played at a volume of my choosing. My heart went out to Lee, who never gets to be truly alone with herself.

Sittenfeld has an ear for believable dialogue. Her characters say things that teens would say - NOT the clever things they might have thought of twenty minutes after the fact. (Yes, I know John Green's characters are adorable and entertaining, but have you really ever met kids who speak the way they do?) As the author was a Cincinnati girl who attended a boarding school in Massachusetts, I suspect at least some of this is autobiographical. And, as a first novel, it's got a lot going for it.

But . . . as much as I enjoyed the book, I wouldn't recommend it. It is long, and drawn out, with the story evolving at a glacial pace - we experience FOUR YEARS in a young girl's life. When Lee reflects that something seems like it happened long ago, it does seem like so very long ago. Lee is not particularly likable, and makes some questionable choices in her quest for popularity. I was cringing at her desperate attempts to make a sought-after boy notice her.

Maybe I was also cringing at some of the memories this reading has kindled: embarrassing moments I'd rather forget, high school friends I treated shabbily, my own desires to be one of the "cool" kids. Damn you, high school! It's only four freakin' years of our lives, but this shit never goes away, does it?

While this is a well-written book, I am not in its target audience of teenagers who attend or who want to attend boarding school. The rather pathetic protagonist, a scholarship girl from South Bend, IN, spends all her time hiding at an expensive northeastern prep school. Stereotypes about Midwesterners (clueless), Democrats (good), non-whites (the "others"), girls (can't do math), girls (utterly focused on boys), girls (unathletic) etc. etc. drip off each page. The only interesting character is her father, toward whom the protagonist behaves abominably.

There is also a technology disconnect, so to speak. The book contains references to pay phones and to a shared dorm phone throughout, but suddenly the protag is writing her Brown application on a computer.

There is no arc, no resolution, just a weary, continuing crisis of self-confidence as the protagonist moons over a first crush.

The Harry Potter books, which share a boarding school setting, are about something bigger (legends, myths, good and evil) and are more upbeat. For those who feel compelled to read about boarding schools, I recommend The Secret Place by Tana French.

Seriously, why did I waste 2 evenings reading this??? The main character, Lee, is very hard to like . . . so needy, self-involved, and afraid. I was hopeful the story would pick up and she would grow out of some of this, but nope, that didn't happen. Then there was her obsession with Cross . . . tell me crap like this doesn't happen!! I really can't understand why this book has been so popular -- it was a major disappointment.

Reviewed by Amanda Dissinger for TeensReadToo.com

Walking through the typical young adult section of a bookstore, there are usually five, maybe even ten, books about a teenage girl, perhaps from a small town, who transfers from that wee little town to a prep school.

Typically, this prep school is in Connecticut, or Massachusetts. Typically, the girl starts out struggling, tries to fit in with the popular crowd, misses her hometown, faces many moral problems, and meets a handsome, promising young prep school boy who shows her the ways of love. Seeing the plot of Curtis Sittenfeld's PREP for the first time, a normal reader would write it off as being another cliché prep school book.

There's where they'd be wrong.

PREP is a searing, creative look at the life of one small-town girl, Lee Fiora, who comes from her home in South Bend, Indiana, to Ault, a prep school in Massachusetts. Exposed to many new kinds of ideas and people, Lee stands on the thin line between misery and naivety as she explores all that her new life has to offer.

Sittenfeld writes about teen angst in a way that doesn't try to make it seem petty or unimportant; she embraces it, and fully understands it. This is what sets the book apart from many other titles. Wallowing in loneliness and heartbreak, the reader feels as if Lee is actually a part of them, and that they are experiencing all of the awkward and horrible events that are occurring in the story.

Lee acts as an opposite-gender Holden Caulfield, the main male character in J.D. Salinger's classic novel THE CATCHER IN THE RYE. She takes everything with a grain of salt and a little bit of dry humor while making wise observations well beyond her years. PREP is bound to become a classic, for its brutally honest interpretation of a time that plagues all of us: high school.

For whatever reason, I feel deeply connected to this book. I am thankful for it, and I love it very much.

I recently read this for an encyclopedia entry I was writing on post-2000 coming-of-age novels, so my assessment, I fear, isn't really fair. On the one hand, I think Sittenfeld is a very talented writer, but on the other, I kept wanting to say GTFU (you know, grow the *#^$ up), which seems very, very ungenerous of me. In the end, I can appreciate what attracted people to this book, making it a surprise success. That doesn't mean the book sticks with me or changed my life in any drastic way---and isn't that what we crave from a novel? I guess the lesson I learned from writing the entry is that WAY too many of us authors (if I may call myself that) go the C-of-Age route early in life. If we're lucky, we mature to recognize that adolescence isn't the be-all, end-all of our lives---despite what the culture tells us about clinging to youth. I want adult books, and I want to say to Curtis, please, please, after THE MAN OF MY DREAMS (the follow up to PREP), take a risk, look beyond your own experience, imagine someone who's not a 16-28 year old girl/woman struggling with place/parental affection/identity, and write me a magnum opus about---oh, I don't know---exploited sugar cane workers in South Florida.

Then again, who am I to ask such a thing of an author?

3.5