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.
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I THINK THAT everything, or at least the part of everything that happened to me, started with the Roman architecture mix-up. 1, THIEVES
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(@TransworldBooks, 30 November 2012, 480 pages, ebook, borrowed from @GlasgowLib via @OverDriveLibs)
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The author has been on my must read list since I took part in the blog tour for her astonishing novel, Rodham earlier this year. I had high hopes for Prep. The novel more or less lived up to my expectations. It took a few chapters for me to realise Ault was a boarding school and at first I thought Lee was at college. Prep is not your typical book about struggling to find your place in high school, it's very mature. The book is narrated in the first person from Lee's POV. She's a great character, easy to relate to and I enjoyed the time I spent in her head. Prep deals with themes of identity, bullying, friendship and first love to name but a few. I thought this was a great read.
