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A Novel
Random House Trade Paperbacks
December 2005
On Sale: November 22, 2005
448 pages
ISBN: 081297235X
EAN: 9780812972351
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Fiction
Curtis Sittenfeld’s debut novel, Prep, is an insightful,
achingly funny coming-of-age story as well as a brilliant
dissection of class, race, and gender in a hothouse of
adolescent angst and ambition. 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 behavior
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.
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