Book Review: Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld

I seem to be reading a lot of first novels lately, all good. Prep is about a middle-class girl's experience at a boarding school. Bored at her public junior high school in South Bend, Indiana, Lee Fiora takes it upon herself to send away for boarding school catalogues and apply. Both she and her parents were surprised when she got in. Her parents couldn't afford such luxury, but when the Ault School in Massachusetts offered her a scholarship that paid for three-quarters of her tuition, they let Lee go.

Lee finds the experience to be more than she bargained for. The teenagers at Ault are rich and sophisticated. As a scholarship student, Lee feels like an outsider. In her senior year, she made the mistake of telling a reporter too much about what it's like to go to school at Ault and not be rich and finds herself shut out further. Furthermore, good grades don't come as easily to her at Ault as they did when she was in junior high in South Bend. At one point she was actually in some danger of getting kicked out for poor grades. Still, she never seems to seriously consider going home (I think I would have lasted about a week). She stays for her entire four years of high school.

It's unclear to me whether Lee was better off for the experience or not. It seems to me that the experiences of adolescence--massive insecurity, the intensity of her relationships, peer and academic pressure--are greatly amplified by her boarding school experience. I can so clearly remember thinking many of her thoughts when I was in high school, but being so far from home and among students of a different social class would have to make things so much harder. Plus, it didn't get her into a more prestigious college, and even if it had, I'm not sure it would have been worth it. As the character herself points out, you have your whole life to leave your parents.

I loved this book; as I mentioned, I can remember thinking many of Lee's same thoughts and thus really identified with her, though I never went to boarding school (actually, I entertained thoughts of boarding school for about a week in eighth grade; my parents correctly figured that it was just a phase and waited for it to pass). But the painful experience of adolescence is pretty much universal in our culture, and Sittenfeld does a wonderful job of capturing it.