2005

Not actually a YA book, this is the story of a middle-class, midwestern girl who attends an elite Massachusetts boarding school on scholarship. ( )

Reviewed by Amanda Dissinger for TeensReadToo.com

Walking through the typical young adult section of a bookstore, there are usually five, maybe even ten, books about a teenage girl, perhaps from a small town, who transfers from that wee little town to a prep school.

Typically, this prep school is in Connecticut, or Massachusetts. Typically, the girl starts out struggling, tries to fit in with the popular crowd, misses her hometown, faces many moral problems, and meets a handsome, promising young prep school boy who shows her the ways of love. Seeing the plot of Curtis Sittenfeld's PREP for the first time, a normal reader would write it off as being another cliché prep school book.

There's where they'd be wrong.

PREP is a searing, creative look at the life of one small-town girl, Lee Fiora, who comes from her home in South Bend, Indiana, to Ault, a prep school in Massachusetts. Exposed to many new kinds of ideas and people, Lee stands on the thin line between misery and naivety as she explores all that her new life has to offer.

Sittenfeld writes about teen angst in a way that doesn't try to make it seem petty or unimportant; she embraces it, and fully understands it. This is what sets the book apart from many other titles. Wallowing in loneliness and heartbreak, the reader feels as if Lee is actually a part of them, and that they are experiencing all of the awkward and horrible events that are occurring in the story.

Lee acts as an opposite-gender Holden Caulfield, the main male character in J.D. Salinger's classic novel THE CATCHER IN THE RYE. She takes everything with a grain of salt and a little bit of dry humor while making wise observations well beyond her years. PREP is bound to become a classic, for its brutally honest interpretation of a time that plagues all of us: high school. ( )

I can only think of one other book that pissed me off as much as this one. The protagonist had no growth and wasn't very interesting. I read about half of the book and decided I couldn't take it anymore, so I read the last chapter just to find out if she ever improved. She didn't. ( )

In an alternate universe, Tom Wolfe’s Charlotte Simmons was born in Indiana and wrote her story from prep school instead of college. Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep is so similar to Wolfe’s novel, I had to keep flipping to the front cover to make sure that I wasn’t rereading it.

The stories are slightly different in paper work, mostly in that Lee, the story teller in Sittenfeld’s novel is thirteen when she decides to go to New England for boarding school and Charlotte is 18 when she leaves her rural southern town for a Duke-like campus. Both girls leave lower middle class homes in relative obscurity where they had been the top of their class. They soon find themselves in the middle of academic and financial excess, completely out of their element. Instead of thriving in the environments presented, both flounder to the point of self destruction.

The commentary on class division and social culture wars are similar and the self doubt is rampant through both. Prep sings a slightly more authentic tune as it takes place over the course of four years versus Wolfe’s one, fleshing out characters and allowing the observer to watch Lee grow out of some of the crippling social anxiety she had when she arrived at school.

I think that my biggest problem with the “shy girl goes to school” issue is that both Lee and Charlotte are so completely disarmed by their own insecurities that neither study rings true as teenage angst but rather manifests as a deeper, more serious social disorder and I found myself less sympathetic and more concerned.

Now, this may be because I am fairly extroverted and while i was never the head cheerleader or my sorority president, I have very rarely been a true wall flower. Perhaps both novels are accurate portrayals of shy students. In Lee’s case, though, her loner habits appeared after her arrival at Ault so it seems less likely that she would really go from a happy social girl at her public high school to a serious recluse.

I think the other problem is that while I enjoyed the cultural commentary and the level of mockery at Society’s expense, it comes at a bad time. Prep was published in the year between The O.C. and Gossip Girl, two successful tales of a youth out of water, scooped out of lower middle class obscurity to observe and dissect the pleasures and perils of the wild elite. Certainly the waiting public never gets tired of the political Cinderella story but it does seem that the market is a bit saturated at the moment or was at the moment when Prep arrived.

All of this in mind, had I not read Charlotte Simmons or had I shied away from my T.V. over the last five years, I think that I would rave about Prep. While it has several notable flaws, the writing is not one and I think that given a different subject matter, I would definitely pick up something else by Sittenfeld. Don’t over look this book but do keep in mind that it is nothing to write home about on the administration letter head. ( )