This is one of the dullest books I've ever read. This is my 4th Sittenfeld and I think I'm starting to see the pattern. The main heroine tends to be painfully boring and have no personality whatsoever and this young girl is no exception. But unlike with Romantic comedy or Eligible, there's nothing funny or witty here. This is a story about a 15 year old who goes to some very pretentious private school and we are privy to her every thought or gesture. So many details about her every day life and zero reasons for me to care about her or anyone else. I did think Sittenfeld is long-winded in her latest, but it's nothing compared to this one or Sisterland.

***NO SPOILERS***

Sittenfeld impressed me with this story. I wasn’t expecting something as deep as I got from Prep--which isn’t to say I was expecting it to be frivolous, just that it’s more than meets the eye. The setting is a boarding school and all that accompanies that, but Prep isn’t about the petty and superficial drama of wealthy teen snobs. That would make it not worth reading.

Prep is told from the first-person perspective of socially anxious Lee, a lower-middle–class scholarship student attending a boarding school with a $22,000-a-year price tag. Her keen awareness of the socio-economic differences between her and her high-class schoolmates cripples her, and a large part of the story occurs inside her head as she obsesses over feelings of inadequacy.

Many school stories tell of teen groups shunning certain others, but Prep is different. Lee’s identity and sense of self-worth is intimately connected to her socio-economic status, so Prep is a strong psychological study. The very wealthy supporting characters are only rough sketches or at most, one-dimensional, but when they do appear, they underscore the socio-economic differences well.

I admired Sittenfeld’s take on the boarding-school story. She set out to make Prep a commentary on something bigger and achieved it with flying colors. Each chapter is yet another vivid illustration of the message but subtly so, and by the end, the picture is complete. I got the sense that Sittenfeld wrote Prep with calculated restraint, understanding that to rush the story would be to risk hitting her reader over the head.

Her writing did need some polishing, so I don’t consider Prep expert. Sittenfeld tended to write extremely long sentences full of comma splices. These were so clumsy that sometimes I couldn’t make heads or tails of what she was saying and just gave up. I also was distracted by her overuse and occasional misuse of dashes. Still, I do look forward to reading more of her work, and I recommend Prep to all those interested in a deeper teen-centered novel.

3.5
The writing of this book was spectacular but too young for me the book was overall.

I don't know who told Curtis Sittenfeld she could read my teenage diary. Especially since I never actually kept one.

3.5 actually. I don't really understand why so many people are upset about the main character not "growing", who the hell becomes emotionally mature in High School? Whiny and frustrating? Yep, it's a coming of age story! I wished there could have been more conflict introduced and I kept waiting for a big emotional smack-in-the-face moment but overall I thought it was a better than average character study.

I couldn't do it. I DNFd at 20%.

Nothing. Was. Happening. There was no sense of urgency, no conspiracy, no thrilling backstory, no real plot - as far as I could tell. I was not going to devote anymore time to this so I quit and moved on.

I loathed this book, really really hated it. I kept reading, hoping for the moment when the narrator would stop complaining, stop blaming everyone else for her misery, but the moment never came. She finished high school, went on with her life, and yet KEPT COMPLAINING about boarding school. It is easy to take pot shots at New England boarding schools, and at high school in general, but this book lacks any humor and the narrator lacks any self-awareness. I don't know that I would have liked this book more if I had read it during high school because the author, who comes of as fairly self-righteous in interviews, denies that this book is meant for young adults or "chick-lit" readers. You'd be better served reading an unhappy teenager's blog.

I am very pleased to report that Prep, a first novel by Curtis Sittenfeld, has finally been published. This is a book that I desperately wanted Imprint X to buy, back when I read it under its original, cleverer title (CIPHER). Nearly two years later, it was finally published in hardcover by "little Random."

The new title doesn't do the book any favors; it underlines the superficial side of the story. The novel covers Lee Fiora's high school career as a boarding student at the prestigious Ault School. Lee is an anomaly: a white scholarship student from the Midwest in a sea of ultra-rich white Easterners and carefully-selected representatives of minority groups. On the surface, the book is about a girl who's out of her element, surrounded by snobs and jocks who speak a social language foreign to her. What the original title, CIPHER, reflected was that the novel is really about Lee's struggle to learn how to present herself to others. How much should she change her behavior to fit in? How much of herself should she keep hidden? Can she even control how others perceive her? The book is about Lee, not the school.

The novel's eight sections would seem disconnected if Lee were not such a good character. She is clearly narrating from adulthood, painfully aware of how her behavior was naïve or self-defeating, but Sittenfeld simultaneously conveys an in-the-minute sense of how desperately important everything is to a fifteen-year-old. She captures the sad chaos of graduation and shows how much one glance from a boy can matter, without ever trivializing Lee’s feelings. Lee’s primary dilemma is how to relate to the other students when she feels she has nothing to say to them--and once she has marked herself as weird by purposefully staying alone, how can she change their impression of her and get to know them? Particularly in the earlier sections of the book (corresponding to Lee’s freshman and sophomore years), her desperation and frustration are palpable, excruciatingly real. She consciously eschews any attempt to fit into the school’s pecking order, only to turn around and allow the popular students to take advantage of her. Her mortifying quasi-romance with a popular boy named Cross who never acknowledges in her public is the most extreme example of this. The ending comes very close to being too trite--a newspaper reporter arrives to ask Lee questions about her boarding school experience, which seems a bit too convenient--but Sittenfeld spins this into a new personal fiasco for Lee, one that leaves the reader with the impression that Lee has grown as a person, but that her relationship with the school hasn’t changed at all.

Above all, I admire Sittenfeld for writing a novel about a teenage girl that isn't full of precocious sexual discovery, ironic literary references and pseudo-poetic hyperbole, or familial discord.

Ever meet someone who at 30, 40, or 50 goes on and on about how high school was either the best or wost time of their life, and you wonder what the heck they've done in the past 10-30 years? If not, read this novel - you'll meet her. If this were presented as something the main character had written a few years after high school, I'd probably have forgiven the still-not-over-it-ness of the book, but seriously - she tells how everyone else's lives turned out years down the road so we know she's meant to be writing well into adulthood; however, she shows absolutely no personal growth from the time she is writing about. Yes, there were times I could identify with her experiences and feelings, but way more of the time I spent wanting to shake her and say "grow the hell up!"

The kicker? The big turning point scandal hinted at in front flap is like 10-pages worth of story that turns out to really mean nothing and from which the author seems to really have learned nothing. Gah!

I don't remember how this ended up on one of my recommended reading lists, and I think I need to start keeping track because I keep getting stuck with these clunkers!

An absolute masterpiece! One of the best I’ve ever read. The plot is so complex, yet so simple at the same time, that it moves quickly and slowly at once. The details are so hilarious that I found myself re-reading sentences for a second laugh.

You know, I started out really liking this book. I thought the writing was good, and I found myself really relating to the protagonist as I used to have many of the same tendencies (not really involving myself in things and instead just hanging out on the fringes of life). But then about halfway through, the book just turned craptastic. Of course the craptastickness involved a boy. It always does. But it just ruined the book for me. It made me just not like Lee, the main character, at all. She turned sort of pathetic for me.

All the reviews raved about how this was Catcher in the Rye from a girl's perspective. My question for them is: Have you ever actually read Catcher? Because they're nothing alike.

I write this review to save you from being sucked into the hype. Don't buy into it; there's nothing extraordinary about this book. Go watch Dead Poets Society instead. (I'm assuming you've already read Catcher in the Rye, right? Let's hope so.)

i really tried to like this book, but this is the paragraph that made me finally give up: "Before and after I was involved with Cross Sugarman, I heard a thousand times that a boy, or a man, can't make you happy, that you have to be happy on your own before you can be happy with another person. All I can say is, I wish it were true."
the entire book is like this. the characters are all shallow and completely one-dimensional and all they do is complain. i will commend sitttenfeld on her ability to write like a teenager (thus two stars instead of one), but i just can't bear one more lustful reference to cross sugarman.