Prep

Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld's first book, is a remarkable analysis of class, race, and gender set amid a hotbed of teenage ambition and anguish. It is also an intelligent and painfully comic coming-of-age narrative.

When Lee Fiora's father puts her off in front of her dorm at the esteemed Ault School in Massachusetts, she is a perceptive and intellectual fourteen-year-old. The boarding school's glossy brochure, which features scenes of boys in sweaters chatting in front of old brick buildings, girls in kilts holding lacrosse sticks on immaculately mowed athletic fields, and everyone singing hymns in chapel, is at least partially the reason she leaves her lively, loving family in South Bend, Indiana.

Lee quickly discovers that Ault is a segregated community of beautiful, cynical teens who spend their summers on Nantucket and communicate in their own unique, witty language. Lee is both captivated and terrified by her peers, which eventually leads her to become an astute observer of their customs and mores. She is attracted to and repulsed by other loners and feels like an outcast all the time as a scholarship student. Lee has earned a spot at Ault via hard work by the time she is a senior. Her carefully constructed identity inside the group is destroyed, however, when her conduct takes a self-destructive and very public turn.

In the end, Lee's experiences—difficult relationships with her teachers, close friendships with other girls, an obsession with a classmate who is more of a crush than a boyfriend, and arguments with her parents, from whom Lee feels more and more cut off—combine to create a unique portrait of the exhilarating and painful adolescence that is shared by all of us.

taken from the hardback copy.