Prep (Curtis Sittenfield)

This is the second boarding school related book I've read this week - the first was the delightfully creepy A Great and Terrible Beauty, which is completely different to the neurotic, modern American world of Prep.

At first, I really empathised with Prep's heroine, the awkward, angsty outsider, Lee. She's a scholarship student at Ault, a boarding school filled with wealthy kids, and I think Sittenfield captures those neurotic, self-obsessed teenager years perfectly. I found, however, that my fondness for Lee waned as the novel progressed - while she travels through her years at school, she never seems to be touched by them, or changed by them. She stays, deliberately, on the periphery, and near the end does something which moves her even further away from many of her schoolmates. I found this frustrating; a character who, while she does learn and grow, does so after the story which we are being told.

Prep doesn't have a particular plot, as such. Characters drift in and out of the main narrative thread. Lee's obsession with popular basketballer Cross is a reoccuring theme, but mostly we walk through her school years with her, watching her classmates (Lee is always watching other people, which I relate to). Ault had become a very real place for me by the time I finished Prep, but it's not a place I'd particularly like to visit, and Lee isn't a character I'd really like to see again either. Despite this, Prep is a very enjoyable read, and very skilled as well - Sittenfield writes well, and as I said earlier, she does a great job of capturing those self-conscious teenage years.