Review of Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld I’m still not entirely sure what I feel about this book. I’ve jumped from one star to five stars and finally decided to split the difference and settle on three (or technically 2.5, but I always round up). While the book is written well and the main character has a strong voice, there was just something about it that seemed off to me, something that kept me from getting emotionally invested and constantly putting the book down out of frustration with the characters and the way they were portrayed.
“Prep” is the story of Lee Fiora, a middle class girl
from Indiana who decides she’d like to go to a boarding school. So she takes the initiative and applies, knowing if she gets accepted her parents will never have the funds to actually send her there. Of course this is where the universe calls her bluff, gives her a scholarship, and the next year sees her off into the world of the privileged upper class and the world of boarding schools. As you can imagine the world Lee expected and the world she entered were two different things, and now Lee has to deal with the stigma of being a “scholarship kid” in little ways: like being
embarrassed her father owns a mattress store and not a bank, or that her parents haven’t come down to visit every parents’ weekend, or that her parents don’t understand the social structure and etiquette of a school like Ault. Where this story diverges from the well trodden path of “poor kid goes to boarding school” lit is that Lee Fiora is ordinary, adequate. And she stays that way for the rest of the book.
Lee does not really change or grow, she’s upset with what she doesn’t have and
then gets upset when she gets what she wants but it doesn’t live up to her expectations (like the relationships she enters into during her time at school with both boys and friends). Then Lee moves on to college, at a state school (gasp) and she leaves the world of priviledge behind her forever, only to look back at it from her college student perspective throughout the narrative.
I guess what I disliked most about the book is that it’s narrated by a version of Lee Fiora that we never see. The Lee-narrator is somewhat confident, seems
intelligent, and like she has her head on straight. The adolescent Fiora is very much the opposite, and makes very little “coming of age” growth throughout her four years at Ault, if anything her character gets more and more frustrating. She still comes across human, plenty of us regret the way we acted as teens even just a few years out of adolescence. This is where my confusion about how to rate the book comes in. The characters seem human, the writing was well done, but the
story itself just wasn’t very compelling. Every chapter I kept waiting for the plot to start, and nothing every really did.
Parts of this book drag on and took me forever to get through, other parts moved quickly and held my interest. Overall the book was just ”okay”.
I’m still not entirely sure what I feel about this book. I’ve jumped from one star to five stars and finally decided to split the difference and settle on three (or technically 2.5, but I always round up). While the book is written well and the main character has a strong voice, there was just something about it that seemed off to me, something that kept me from getting emotionally invested and constantly putting the book down out of frustration with the characters and the way they were portrayed.
