Lee is from South Bend, Indiana, and longs for more than her town can give her. She becomes fixated with the idea of going to a boarding school, and, in the end, is granted a scholarship to one far from her home. But her fantasies about school don't mesh with the reality, and, under the social pressure, she looses her self-confidence and becomes lost and unhappy. As I read, I wondered whether this was a YA novel or an adult novel -- it's sold as an adult novel, but has a YA friendly title and cover. I think it's correct to consider it a literary novel for adults, because of the story's ambivalence, lack of resolution, and the time Sittenfeld spends dwelling on Lee's emotional landscape. It's also not a particularly comfortable novel: Lee repeats her mistakes, she does bad things, and yet her world is characterized by a very adult sort of mundanity. I first read this book shortly after it was published, and I remember finding it compelling but unsatisfying. Fifteen years later, the things that left me unsatisfied seem like part of its strength: it's about the flux of growing up, but also the ways we let ourselves and other people down, and the ways in which mediocrity and disillusionment are inevitable. I was still frustrated by this novel, but more by how shallow Lee is than by her lack of clarity: her only interest, and Sittenfeld's only concern as a novelist, is in interpersonal relationships, and I desperately wanted something else. The story is narrated by an older Lee, looking back on her past self, and I wish there was a sense that her horizons broadened after leaving school. But Sittenfeld doesn't show any sense of life becoming wider than what you think of other people and what they think of you. Ultimately, this disappointed me, but I was also gripped by it.

The main character, Lee, is so deeply unlikeable because the writing in this book is so perfect and tight. When have I witnessed the outrageous complexities and longings of a teenage girl's mind laid so bare and articulate? Reading this was like cutting myself from falling into a million broken mirrors and I couldn't get enough and wanted to fall into a basin of glass until it became liquid. This book felt so indulgent, not a giddy pleasure, but the relief when you are free to rant about all the people you hate for no reason to an old friend who will not reprimand you or give any sort of opinion because they know you long enough to be able to see you, human and awful and loved.

My daughter and her best friend recommended this book to my husband and me. It's a quality trip down memory lane for those of us who attended high school in the 1980s, and a good reminder of how monumental personal dramas can look until (in the protagonist's case, the last sentence) we step back and remember that we are tiny souls living on a planet spinning through a vast space. For anyone going through a hard time, this book can serve as a reminder that 'This, too, shall pass" and that someday the experiences we are living through will become interesting stories, or just ho-hum footnotes, in the chapters of our lives.

It's weird to praise a book that regularly made me feel uncomfortable and/or annoyed, but then I have to praise the author for writing so well that I felt such things so acutely.

**Imagine you were sent to a school hundreds of miles away from your home and you were all alone. That’s the beginning of Prep, a poignant novel written into the perspective of an over analytical high school student, Lee Fiora. This is the story of everything that goes on inside her head while going to the prestigious and wealthy Ault school. This is a realistic novel because Lee is alone for the first time, she shows that high school is not just an educational institute, but also a place filled with peer pressure, emotional issues, popularity ranks, and the problems that normal everyday people have to deal with, and the author makes an excellent and clear connection with society today, and to that of the plot and characters in the literature world.

In Prep, Lee, at first, is alone. When she first enters the school, already did she start to feel out of place. Awkwardly, she wears a dress when everyone else wears casual and comfy clothes. Also, nobody she knows went to Ault. Later on in the story, Lee has two roommates, Dede, and Sin Jun. She barely talks to either of them. She feels like an outcast compared to the other students.

It is here we learn that school is more than just an educational institute. Lee meets Cross Sugarman, another student at Ault, during a trip to the mall. This is where we get a glimpse of Lee's emotional feelings for another person. Another example would be when Sin Jun was hospitalized after a failed suicide attempt, she overdoses herself on medication. This shocks everyone because nobody knows why Sin Jun would try to commit suicide; they think she's just another quiet person. Furthermore, when a reporter, Angela Varizi, from the New York Times, comes to interview Lee about Ault, the answers end up becoming somewhat insulting to both the school and its students. Cruelly, almost everyone at school starts treating Lee worse, even her own best friend, Michelle, doubts her, showing that school can become a vicious and terrifying place.

The author makes many connections between the book and reality. Lee has emotional problems just like everyone else. She struggles with anger and frustration when she has a fight with her dad. She suffers jealousy and feels alienated when it comes to Cross. Lee has her own family problems; she doesn't like the way her dad is so goofy and how her brother is following in his footsteps. Angered, she does not appreciate their behavior. Lastly, Lee is quite observant and watchful and tends to note on her surroundings. This connects with reality because there are some people, such as myself, that are very observant and take notes on the things around us.

In conclusion, Prep is a realistic work of fiction. Lee is on her own when she first goes to Ault, her experience there shows that school is not just a place to learn, and the author portrays the similarities of the book and reality. These are some of the reasons why Prep is a realistic story.

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This book shows the perspective view of high school through the eyes of a high school student, Lee Fiora. Lee shows that high school is not just an educational institute, but also a place filled with peer pressure, emotional issues, popularity ranks, and the problems that normal everyday people have to deal with. The author makes an excellent connection with society today, and to that of the plot and characters in the literature world. "Prep: A Novel", deserves 5 stars and is recommended to young adults and above.

Disorganic writing, if I wanted to read about a mediocre girl I’d just look at my life.
Boarding schools are one of my favourite trope. Yet Prep was absolutely boring. I kept waiting for an interesting twist: is she gay? will she murder someone? Nothing as such happens. Actually, nothing happens. Ever. This is like the most typical high school story ever – girl has few friends except a close one, has a crush on a popular boy, feels out of place most of the time. I suppose it deserves praise for being relatable, except that I read to escape my life not to read about it.

It was so bad, except now I’m here thinking about my own mediocre life, about how I probably come across just as obnoxious and boring as her, how I was accepted by a prestigious place and come from white low-middle class parents who are working hard to afford this school, how I am missing out on the friends-front (…I am not actually, I have great friends whom I love and I am thankful for and who I hope will be a constant part of my whole life, but I don’t get along with my classmates, with just one exception), how I have been having trouble with math despite being excellent at it before, how I am too a ‘nobody from Idaho’ (replace Idaho with small rural town, you get the idea).
I am utterly scared that I’ll end up just another average graduate going to a mediocre grad school, with mediocre grades, mediocre curriculum, mediocre intellect, mediocre future.
Because yes, comparison is bad; yes, ‘success’ comes in different ways; yes, maybe I have too high standards. But that is the point: it’s me who set the bar, I decide what these standards are, I decide what I want.
((Sometimes I get into fights with my mom because she has this tendency to tell me that ‘it’s okay, it’s still a good grade’. Well, guess what? I don’t care. It’s not the grade I want. And it’s not the grade I need if I aim high. This is not being supportive. And if it’s not a grade, it’s something else, but the idea is the same.))
And I want a lot. Yes, I want money, I want prestige, I want to be envied and praised, because I am externally validated and that is not a bad thing.
Which actually is the key difference between me and the main character. I want those things, and I am willing to work hard to get them. (It’s an oversimplification of course, at the core I want to a) find a place where I belong and b) enjoy my time with challenging and interesting tasks, of course getting a high-paying job is not everything, I’m not that daft). Truth to be told, character-wise we are nothing alike, but I fear that our paths might be similar.
Well, guess this will be my motivation for trying harder I guess.

after re-reading 7.08:

Sittenfeld is a genius. The voice of Lee Fiora is so poignant and so real — she is so screwed up, but Sittenfeld shows this to us perfectly, in small bites, with a background (and the perfect characters for foils) that out her screwed-up-ness crisply and in heartbreaking detail. Lee speaks from a gorgeously flawed teenage place — somewhere intensely familiar, somewhere achingly wrong about so many things — and her foibles translate so well for me. This reread (number three) felt new because this time I am in love, and that influence of being-in-love totally enhanced my reading — surprisingly it pulled me closer to Lee and reminded me, over and over, what I've learned from her, this time and all other times.

I love this book. Utterly and absolutely.



posted 12.06:

I came back to this book, revisiting an old friend, because I had a wretched experience with  Sarum, by Edward Rutherfurd, of which I read 445 pages before returning it to the library unfinished because I was terminally bored. Best decision I've ever made.

Prep hits me in places I'm not entirely sure I like being hit, but I always feel better afterwards for it--catharsis at its best, I think. This was just as true through my rereading as it was the first time around. Lee's experience, and the way she relates it through her sharp, insightful, guileless first-person narration, resonates with me such in a deep way that it's actually difficult for me to talk about it; I'm much more likely to cry than to speak eloquently about this book. (This makes it a beautiful challenge to recommend at the bookstore.) This read-through had me thinking even more about college and crushes and the immediacy of everything when you're away at school. I know my tendency to be nostalgic magnifies this all for me, but I wouldn't have it any other way. I liked being poked; Prep pokes me, and the tears always feel better for having been shed.

Prep is another example of a genre I usually tend to enjoy, the classic coming-of-age 'outsider' novel involving a naive young hero(ine) entering into a world of privilege and prejudice. I have read a lot of books in the same vein, so it's no real surprise that I enjoyed this one. Sittenfeld is excellent at describing the complexities of teenage thoughts and feelings in an unorthodox but uncannily accurate manner. I liked the protagonist, Lee, and in many ways identified with her, but at the same time felt she was something of a blank canvas (a Mary Sue, if you like) designed for the reader to project his or her teenage self onto, in order to make the story easy to relate to for the greatest number of readers possible*. I also found it slightly irritating that certain characters and situations were prominent in some chapters but disappeared entirely in others, but my guess is that this was deliberate, since it's very true to the transient, fickle nature of teenagers. Ultimately I thought there was something depressing about the story - perhaps this was just because it reminded me of being that age - but also because it all seems to come to nothing and in some ways there appears to be no point to it all. And yet, something about the book makes me keep wanting to go back to it, so perhaps that doesn't matter. Had I read it over a longer period of time, I might have appreciated it more - I think I might actually re-read it at a later date, but at this point it is seared into my memory as that book I read in Manchester airport when my flight was delayed.

*This is what I thought at the time, but I've been browsing others' reviews and it seems a majority of readers strongly disliked Lee, so I may have to revise this opinion. What I meant is that I didn't think some of the different aspects of her personality quite gelled together as they should have. Reading excessively negative reviews has actually made me feel quite angry and defensive of the book - I think a lot of people are forgetting that Lee is a very young girl (only thirteen at the start of her story) and that some of her 'antisocial' choices are deliberate, because she doesn't feel any affinity with the people that surround her, whether they are popular or outsiders. Just because you're isolated by choice doesn't mean you can't feel pain about it. I certainly related to a lot of Lee's experiences and felt that what has been perceived by many as her 'selfishness' was merely symptomatic of her age. I think many books written about/for teenagers are incredibly unrealistic and not representative of what growing up is really like at all, and this is one of the most honest I've come across. Lee's behaviour may be embarrassing, self-involved and even painful at times, but it's also very truthful.

Wow. I was told that I was going to love this book, but I had no idea just how much. I can’t quite put my finger on exactly what is so great about it, I think maybe just how real it is. I absolutely devoured it, and it has kept me from my plans over the last four days because I just wanted to sit on my floor and read it. Now, I’m off to read everything else Curtis Sittenfeld has ever written.

I’m almost halfway through this book and nothing remotely interesting has happened at all and I still strongly dislike the main character so it’s a DNF for me.

I went to prep school. Briefly. In Massachusetts. It was a place with a chapel and a headmaster who knew everyone's names.

When I tell people that, they're like whoa, really? Because, I assume, me and the place described in this book don't seem to go together very well - which, good point, we didn't - and then they say what was it like? And I should just hand them this book and say it was like this.

It was exactly like this, down to such uncanny details that I looked it up to make sure it wasn't the same school. (It wasn't, it was Groton.) So if you've been to boarding school, even for a minute, you'll enjoy this - and if you've ever wondered what it would be like, or at least what it was once like, it was like this, for better and for worse.

And it's most definitely like this to be on financial aid. I reacted to the feeling differently than she did, but I certainly felt her alienation - the invisible wall separating us from most everyone else. Some of the rich students were oblivious to the financial gulf between us, but I wasn't. Not for a second. Later I would learn how to take a kind of aggressive pride in my not-richness, but I hadn't learned it then; I just felt disadvantaged. It made me feel bad.

I love Lee, the hero or the antihero of this book, because I think you can interpret her either way. I personally have a thing for quiet, smart, sarcastic girls, so I'm on her team, but her climactic act...well, it's villainous, isn't it? She is the bad guy, after all, technically, isn't she?

It doesn't all quite hang together as a novel. It's more of a series of vignettes. But it's engagingly written and clearly seen. I dug it.

I’m on a mission to read all of Curtis Sittenfeld’s books because I really enjoy the way she writes women. However, this one just didn’t hit for me like her others. I can see how much her writing has evolved since this book, especially her humor.

Prep didn’t have the sharp class-critique I was looking for just off the heels of reading Sally Rooney. It’s possible this book was more trailblazing at the time of its release in 2005, but by now it’s not making any unique points. I was cringing at times at the classic high school behavior, but I barely put it down.