Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld is a novel that delves into the life of Lee Fiora, a scholarship student from Indiana who navigates the challenges of elite boarding school life at Ault School in Massachusetts.
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Book Blurb
Lee Fiora is an intelligent, observant fourteen-year-old when her father drops her off in front of her dorm at the prestigious Ault School in Massachusetts. She leaves her animated, affectionate family in South Bend, Indiana, at least in part because of the boarding school’s glossy brochure, in which boys in sweaters chat in front of old brick buildings, girls in kilts hold lacrosse sticks on pristinely mown athletic fields, and everyone sings hymns in chapel.
As Lee soon learns, Ault is a cloistered world of jaded, attractive teenagers who spend summers on Nantucket and speak in their own clever shorthand. Both intimidated and fascinated by her classmates, Lee becomes a shrewd observer of–and, ultimately, a participant in–their rituals and mores. As a scholarship student, she constantly feels like an outsider and is both drawn to and repelled by other loners.
By the time she’s a senior, Lee has created a hard-won place for herself at Ault. But when her behaviour takes a self-destructive and highly public turn, her carefully crafted identity within the community is shattered.
Ultimately, Lee’s experiences–complicated relationships with teachers; intense friendships with other girls; an all-consuming preoccupation with a classmate who is less than a boyfriend and more than a crush; conflicts with her parents, from whom Lee feels increasingly distant–coalesce into a singular portrait of the painful and thrilling adolescence universal to us all.
About the Author
Curtis Sittenfeld is an American New York Times bestselling novelist and writer. She is the author of several acclaimed novels and her writing has been praised for its sharp wit, incisive social commentary, and deep empathy for her characters.
In addition to her novels, Sittenfeld has also written for a variety of publications, including The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Salon.
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