Prep

Along with Anthropology of an American Girl, this is one of the books that made me want to become a writer. More specifically, it opened my eyes to what a writer can do with a teenage subject.

The story follows a prep-school student, Lee, but Sittenfeld handles her experience with all the nuance of “adult” subjects. I also admire how Sittenfeld captures the labyrinthine social politics of an elite boarding school and comments on class and race hierarchies without ever feeling didactic.

I think people mistake this book as YA—I certainly did when I first picked it up as… show more.

Most of the books about boarding school (prep school) focus on boys and what happened to them or how horney they were. But Sittenfelt dares to focus on a girl at prep school and what she goes through to fit in. I was drawn into her world and could feel everything she went through.

I liked the crisp writing and lack of feeling sorry for the main character, even though she was treated badly. I wanted her to feel better about herself and her situation, but as she got pulled further and further into what others wanted her to be… show more.

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.