Peeling away the façade of beautiful people and civilised recreation to uncover an unrelenting parade of social rituals and a never-ending popularity contest, Prep is a vibrant account of fitting in and acting out in the harsh world of the American prep school.
A stunning novel in the great tradition of American coming-of-age novels from Catcher in the Rye to The Secret History.
Lee Fiora is a shy fourteen-year-old when she leaves small-town Indiana for a scholarship at Ault, an exclusive boarding school in Massachusetts. Her head is filled with images from the school brochure of handsome boys in sweaters leaning against old brick buildings, girls running with lacrosse sticks across pristine athletics fields, everyone singing hymns in chapel. But as she soon learns, Ault is a minefield of unstated rules and incomprehensible social rituals, and Lee must work hard to find - and maintain - her place in the pecking order.
Publisher: Transworld Publishers Ltd
ISBN: 9780552776844
Number of pages: 480
Weight: 325 g
Dimensions: 198 x 127 x 30 mm
The OC meets Donna Tartt's The Secret History with flashes of Clueless... Sittenfeld's strength is in making the experience feel universal...Everyone will wince with recognition at the horror of being a teenager. It's great to relive it all, now that it is happening to someone else. - Observer
Straightforward, serious, funny...There is so much that is right about this book. Sittenfeld captures the hothouse atmosphere of boarding-school, the way you see even people you don't like in their underwear...Mostly, however, it's Lee's voice that makes all this worthwhile. - London Review of Books
Curtis Sittenfeld shares with Salinger a knack of capturing, in effortless prose, a teenager mindset...It feels important...Most vitally of all, it feels like adolescence. - The Times
You don't have to have attended an elite Massachusetts boarding school to find yourself reliving your adolescence in Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep...Even the Cross Sugarmans (major crush) and Aspeth Montgomerys (long legs, super popular) of this world will cringe with recognition at the book's fine-knit accuracy and detail. - Vogue
Sweet Valley High as written by George Eliot. Sittenfeld is a pin-sharp observer, and in Prep she needles away at class, race and character...Prep will appeal to any age...A highly accomplished novel. - Independent on Sunday
I love the writing style of this author- having read American Wife i bought this straight away and enjoyed it even more so than the first novel.
I bought this one as it was likened to a dark Donna Tart novel. It was little of the sort.
It was a teenage novel, covering teenage concerns. It was entertaining enough but not worthy of high praise as it was fairly...
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disappointment should be the name of the book because thats all you find in this book.
im sorry normally i would praise a book even if it was awful but this book lacks everything a good book is about.
reading this...
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