Prep

This book is a brilliantly written, honest story set at a prestigious prep school (Ault) in the US. Its sometimes infuriating main character, Lee, doesn’t have a great time there and mostly it’s her own fault. But Lee is a scholarship girl and the unwritten rules of the privileged society she has just chosen to enter bewilder her. This is definitely a coming-of-age book for people who are already well into adulthood. At the end of the book, when real life crashes in on Lee, Sittenfeld writes a chapter that I could read over and over again. It’s so hauntingly… show more.

I chose this book as it depicts a coming-of-age story about attending a fictional prep school and all the challenges that await. Having gone through the angst and ups and downs of attending a girls’ private high school and all that goes with it: gossiping, class issues, bullying, and competitiveness, Prep really hit home in more ways than one.

Set in a fictional prep school in New England over four years in the 80s/90s, the only song that the Prep soundtrack would have to include is “Lay, Lady, Lay” by Bob Dylan since it is the one song narrator Lee Fiora mentions connecting with throughout her high school years. However, I would position that would she have been more open to indulging in music, Lee would have also developed a deep affection for bands like Pixies, Sonic Youth, Violent Femmes, and—obviously—R.E.M.. It’s their music I would feature on a Prep mixtape, anyway. Knowing Lee, she wouldn’t be into The… show more.

This novel’s brilliance and unique female perspective wedged its way into my sensibility as a writer, stoking my desire to tell stories from unexpected voices. Set on a small Massachusetts campus and told from the perspective of a teenage girl who leaves her family behind in Indiana, Prep not only sends you back into the angst of adolescence but is an indoctrination into boarding school rites and rituals. Young Lee Fiora, a scholarship student with outsider status, spends three years earning respect, academically and socially, at the school. There is a price, however, and the saddest of those is a… show more.