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    Prep
    Prep
    Prep
    Audiobook17 hours

    Prep

    Written by Curtis Sittenfeld

    Narrated by Julie Dretzin

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    This New York Times best-seller is a funny and poignant coming-of-age story, a dead-on examination of adolescent angst, and a sharp criticism of America's social structure. Fourteen-year-old Lee Fiora enrolls at the prestigious Ault School of Massachusetts and is surrounded by beautiful, wealthy students. She immediately feels like an outsider, but manages to carve out a niche for herself. Then everything falls apart when Lee's private thoughts become public information.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateSep 10, 2010
    ISBN9781449853389
    Prep
    Author

    Curtis Sittenfeld

    CURTIS SITTENFELD is the New York Times best-selling author of the novels Prep, The Man of My Dreams, American Wife, Sisterland, Eligible, and the forthcoming Rodham, which have been translated into thirty languages. She is also the author of the short story collection You Think It, I'll Say It and her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, the Washington Post Magazine, Esquire, and The Best American Short Stories. Her nonfiction has been published inthe New York Times, The Atlantic, Time, and Glamour, and broadcast on public radio’s This American Life. A native of Cincinnati, she currently lives with her family in Minneapolis.

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    Reviews for Prep

    3.5/5

    1,655 ratings95 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Even though many of the characters were not really likable, they were interesting. The protagonist processed her life in such detail that at times it was tedious and repulsive, but I did want to know what happened to her. I did not learn as much as I would have liked to learn, but the author wrote so that I was often in suspense to learn of the next experience. I do not have private school experience, but I have been an adolescent, so there was much I could identify with.
    • 4/5
      I love Sittenfeld’s writing. She definitely knows how to craft complex characters and evoke emotions and feelings. This felt like a memoir and it’s agonizing in its honesty describing the high anxiety of the teenage girl experience. Thankfully it wasn’t my experience but I never went to boarding school and had my family around me for support. But as a working class poor kid from a rural town, I can only imagine that had I left home at 13 or 14 to attend boarding school, I may have had similar feelings and been plagued by overwhelming anxiety like Lee.

      This book isn’t for everyone. In fact, I wonder if most men would understand the pain of being a teenage girl.
    • 3/5
      Having enjoyed other books by this writer, I gave this one a go. Tells the tale of a young girl from Indiana who wins herself a scholarship to attend an exclusive boarding school near Boston. I’m not sure who the target audience is for this one - it’s about teens but doesn’t really seem to be a Young Adult read. Not much really happens but I suppose it’s just a slice of life/coming of age novel. Probably interesting to real young adults (As opposed to “YA books” which I see as those aimed at the high school audience ie 12-16 yrs).
    • 4/5
      Definitely captures the atmosphere of a New England prep school in the 90s. Also feels like an excellent description of living with anxiety, though it's never called that. Some excellent plot construction. I got sucked into much of the book. She touches on issues of class, race, gender, and sexuality, doing the best with class, but some of the characters are flat and end up servicing the plot. Some of these characters -- Little being the biggest example -- are the ones who are Black or Asian. I understand the young Lee having a limited understanding of race, but the narrator looking back have a better idea but does not, so the attempts to illuminate race at the school fall flat.
    • 3/5
      This was a hard one to get into in part because the main character was so incredibly passive. I know this was probably a deliberate choice on the author's part to demonstrate how a combination of anxiety and insecurity can combine to lock someone in an unhappy situation they feel powerless to change, which is actually a pretty accurate accounting of what its like to be an adolescent. That said...my goodness is it unpleasant to read about it for 400 pages.
    • 4/5
      The main character's feelings of isolation and her sense of being a misfit in a world with social class divisions will speak to many readers, not only those who have gone to prep school.
    • 4/5
      [Prep] is about one midwestern girl's high school experience at an East Coast boarding school. Lee is "on scholarship", which she hides carefully, and utterly terrified of being noticed but depressed that she's not noticed. A typical teenage dilemma. The book is about teenage friendships and perceptions of the world which are obviously narrow. Lee is casually racist and sexist, without realizing she is either. She both resists the wealthy East Coast ideals, and desperately wants to be a part of them. I liked this book, but I felt like it went on a little too long. The main character, who narrates the books, is not likable, but I still could identify in small ways with her teenage experiences. This was Sittenfeld's debut novel - it is full of great writing and insight, but is just a little clunkier than her subsequent novels.
    • 5/5
      Such a guilty pleasure and I think it's really more like 4 stars, but what the hell.... let's do the Cinco. I have been obsessed with boarding schools since I was a kid. I used to sneak upstairs to watch The Facts of Life before dinner and at that time I loved school so much that to imagine a place where you LIVED at the SCHOOL was a dream come true. Not to mention having roommates and wearing a uniform were also secret fantasies of mine...

      Add to that all of the fantastic movies about boarding schools (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Children's Hour, Dead Poets Society, School Ties, Class -with Rob Lowe) that I used to watch on repeat and mix it in with a healthy dose of my being an overly-sensitive, intelligent Midwestern child and you have a recipe for my 5-star rating.

      I WAS/AM Lee Fiora, minus the boarding school. She is highly observant, insecure, always wanting for something more and unsure of how she fits in with her family. This book put me right back into my childhood and thank God 20 years have passed, because I can finally read about it and feel like I've come out on the other side.

      The writing is good! Curtis Sittenfeld is one of my favorite authors; she doesn't always hit the mark but she did with this one. I gobbled it up and relived all the awkward and wonderful moments but after finishing it, I confess it felt good to be a middle-aged person again. That's something I don't say too often.
    • 1/5
      This book stressed me out, which probably means it should get more stars for being evocatively written. But in the end I didn't like it and wished I had kept passing it over on the shelves as I'd happily been doing for the previous decade.
    • 3/5
      I could feel the pain of Lee Fiora as she goes through her high school years at a boarding school far from home. She is insecure and incessantly questions and overthinks every move she makes and thought she has. High school can be very, very hard for some people, and this book brought back some bad memories of my own. Still, it got a little tiring after a while. I've enjoyed Curtis Sittenfeld's later books more than this one.
    • 3/5
      Good storyline and entertaining characters.
    • 3/5
      I really enjoyed American Wife. Prep was hard to enjoy because I was so frustrated with Lee, the main character. She was very hard to like because she was unfriendly, stand offish and would go out of her way to not talk to people. She was very insecure and always worried about what others would think.I could identify with her, however; regarding her unrequited love for Cross and understood her falling for him when to him she was just someone to fool around with.
    • 4/5
      Lee Fiora leaves her Midwestern family in Indiana and goes to boarding school in Massachusetts. She finds that high school is pretty much the same everywhere.
    • 4/5
      This wasn't at all the bright, bouncy beach read I had expected it to be (or frankly, that I thought was promised by the pink-and-green Lilly Pulitzer-esque belt on the cover). It was actually a somewhat dark and fraught coming-of-age tale. I enjoyed it enough to check out what other books the author (who is female, despite the name's appearance the contrary) has written.

      In short, a surprisingly good read.
    • 1/5
      Rarely have I disliked a novel with such violence. I think the main reason for this was disappointment. I often read books that I know I'm going to hate (e.g. anything by Stephenie Meyer or Emily Giffin), and I know I'm going to hate them because their themes get my back up. Sometimes it's good to hate. With 'Prep' though, I was expecting to fall in love. Give me teenagers at boarding school, especially when the main character is the outsider, and I'm won over. 'Friendly fire', 'Harry Potter', 'The catcher in the rye' are just a few of the books that have a special place in my heart thanks to their treatment of the 'teen in institutionalised education' theme. So I read the blurb at the back of 'Prep' and thought, 'I'm going to love this, or at the very least enjoy it'. Sadly it wasn't to be. A hundred pages in I realised I was not enjoying that book at all and that on the contrary it was infuriating me. I kept going, hoping it would get better but it just got worse. When I finally finished it I would happily have ripped it in two, except I don't do that to books. Blame it on my librarian training. What do I pin the blame on? Or where do I start? I don't know, probably with Lee herself. It takes magnificent skill from a writer to make you follow an unlikeable narrator/main character with interest. Daphne du Maurier does a superb job of it 'My cousin Rachel', and Alan Hollinghurst truly impressed me with Nick in 'The line of beauty'. Although not a narrator, Nick is the perspective we have to go with in that novel, and I think his example is relevant here as like Lee he is the odd one out trying (and failing) to carve his place in a social class way above his own. Well, clearly Curtis Sittenfeld is no Hollinghurst, not even a little bit. A little bit would have been better than what she gave us with Lee. Lee has nothing to say, yet she manages to fill more than 400 pages with thorough explorations of her uninteresting navel. NOTHING ELSE HAPPENS. She is cold, selfish, unappreciative, self-obsessed, SO FUCKING SHALLOW. There is literaly nothing to her. She might go unnoticed but what is there to notice? All she talks about is herself and how others affect her/how she appears to others, it's her her her all the time. If at least there were a few interesting observations, descriptions of what she likes... But it seems all she can talk about is nothing, a whole lot of nothing. I was hoping that at some point there would be some mention of what she's studying and how she finds her subjects, how she sees her life evolving from school, but the only thing she seems to care about is how she looks to others, what they think of her and how she can be popular. She is such a nasty jealous person as well, horrible to her family and to the friends who inexplicably stick with her... I found it exhausting and infuriating. The only moment I felt any satisfaction was when her father slapped her. The style sank this sorry mess even further in my opinion. A good writer would have made the reader see Lee exactly for what she is but still want to read about her. If anything Sittenfeld's style seriously put me off. Any attempts at depth fell flat - for example the bit where Lee is reprimanded by her English teacher for not showing enough passion and she thinks to herself that she feels everything too intensely. Well, sorry Curtis but none of that intensity actually reached the page. Lee's existential musings never sounded genuine or insightful, just self-involved, petty and narrow. The succession of cliches sometimes made my jaw hang open in disbelief. The one that stays with me is the bit about Sin-Jun being an obvious lesbian because she has short hair and ear piercings. Seriously? We're still there, are we? Sorry, I thought this was the 21st century. My mistake. There were plenty more cliches too, it wasn't an isolated incident. There's no excuse for that when you're trying to be all literary and deep. Speaking of, the literary devices in there were so heavy and clunky I cringed. The amount of 'in fact' used to no effect, the endless questions of 'am I like this?', 'is this that?', 'why this?' became so tiresome I wanted to scream, the fact that every single time there seemed to be something happening the narrative cut to another pointless anecdote or flashback or musing frustrated me no end... The best thing about this book? It ended. I won't be reading any of Curtis Sittenfeld's other novels. (cross-posted to Goodreads)
    • 4/5
      Read this years ago. I remember loving it. :)
    • 4/5
      When I was a child I used to page through books at the library looking for narrators or heroines I thought were similar to me and was distressed that I never found them quite shy enough or fat enough or sufficiently self-loathing. Now I'm glad I didn't. Lee Fiora might be that narrator I was looking for--plain, unremarkable, silent, friendless--but if I had identified with her as a kid, I don't know whether I would have grown up. In Prep, our heroine, a middle-class girl from Indiana, goes to an elite New England boarding school called Ault and faces the iniquities of high school--the clueless teachers, the super-hard algebra homework, the girls with long blonde hair, the cool kids, and the cool boy who fucks her in the middle of the night but doesn't talk to her during the day. At this school, the cool kids are cool and rich, and even most of the uncool kids are rich, and the minorities are rich, and Lee is, like, the only middle class person there. And she's not cool. She has a really bad time. On one level it is just a gloomy story about a high-school girl, but Lee is such an unusual narrator that the book is unsettling in the way of nightmare dystopias and psychological thrillers. Lee narrates the story with a flat affect and simple language. There are several ways to experience this. Sometimes it seems like bad writing, sometimes a precise imitation of a real teenager, and sometimes the low, out of touch thoughts of a depressive adolescent on the way to psychopathic adulthood.The novel is Lee's inner world, but only while she is at Ault. She herself suggests that she is a different person while there and that this other person disappears as soon as she leaves the campus to fly home. And though we get to know her thoughts and feelings very well, there are two details Sittenfeld leaves out: what she looks like and what she ends up doing after college. While I was reading this I thought it must be a book meant for young adults. the flat tone, the uncomplicated language. reflecting on it, though, I think this is a devastating story about a nobody. It could have been written by a russian. (but not Tolstoy because there's no redemption and not Dostoevsky because there is no morality)Is ault, perhaps, hell? is martha her virgil?is cross her beatrice/or paulo/or is she psyche and he eros?she leaves her home and goes into an alternate realityshe wants to be a different person. she wants to exceed her station in life. but unlike a greek tragedy, which would have her dying a poetically fitting death, she is just really unhappyHer roommate says it. The most frustrating thing about Lee is she doesn't do anything to change her situation. I totally understand this. I was the same way. I have been and am the same way so often. But it's heartbreaking to see it in someone else. (and one so young! a la gigi) Teachers tell her she's a value to the school. But why?? she never tells you anything good about herself. So you sort of have to believe that there are good things, hidden somewhere. Maybe she is lying when she says she never talks to anybody? Maybe she's a great teammate (they all have to play sports--every season--a sign that the place really may be hell). Maybe she's a joy in history class? this is what it's like to be unremarkable....as an adult she still sounds depressed. One of my favorite passages. at the basketball games'sure maybe there are margaritas and no curfew. but there are also puffy white bagels under the fluorescent lights at the office...and blah blah blah"
    • 4/5
      Wow! What a ride! I thought this was going to be your typical "boarding school" story but it went much deeper. I'm not sure I enjoyed it but it intrigued me intellectually. I'd be interested to read more by this author.
    • 3/5
      My views on this novel are extremely ambivalent. Ms. Sittenfeld is an excellent writer. Her prose is well-crafted, her characters are complex, and the conflict is gripping. The story of what transpired with her crush during Lee's senior year is painful to read. I can't say too much without a spoiler, but I was disappointed in the resolution.

      The story gripped me in parts, but dragged a bit in others. Although I enjoyed the large cast of minor characters, I think a slightly tighter edit would have helped keep the tension that was built around Lee's relationships with her peers, and her conflict with her parents and the private school where she struggles to find her place.

    • 5/5
      Sittenfeld, CurtisPrep: A Novel2005. 448 pp. $12.99 pb. Random House. 081297235X. Grades 9 and up.Tags: novel, fiction, coming of age, teenager, boarding school, high school, young adult, prep school, relationships, friendship, self-doubt, loneliness, insecurities, social statusThis coming of age novel will resonate with any current or former teenager whose high school experience was filled with insecurities and self-consciousness. As a scholarship student from the Midwest, Lee attends a prestigious boarding school located in Boston. The book spans her four years at Ault Prep School, written from Lee’s now 24 year-old point of view. Lee’s initial experience at Ault shines a spotlight on her middle class family status, which often embarrasses and continually haunts her. Throughout her high school career, Lee experiences the ups and downs, crushes and heartaches of a typical teenager while set in the atypical backdrop of extreme wealth and social status. Lee’s loneliness and quest to belong is intensified by her self-doubt, yet she still remains an entertaining and likeable narrator. Readers will find Lee’s character both relatable and relevant. This book contains both mature themes and profanity, but would nonetheless make a good addition to a high school or young adult library collection.
    • 4/5
      Interesting - the first half worked, but it seemed like the book dragged on for too long and perhaps got bogged down in needing to have a full four years of school.
    • 2/5
      Prep (2005) by Curtis Sittenfeld is a debut novel about a young Midwestern girl who decides to go to an Eastern prep school. She’s a good student back home and she manages to get accepted into a prestigious prep school on scholarship and for some reason her parents let her go. The protagonist, Lee Fiora, is unbelievably pathetic. I do not believe she was believable at all. It was like every teenage angst poured into one person. She was a good student who becomes less than average and barely manages to get through high school and learn anything. I think that the things she grappled with are not unusual but the fact that she was entirely pathetic in every regard was just too much and she never grew during any of the years she spent at Ault. If anything, she seemed to become stupider. The author not only attempts to explore teenage angst at its extreme, she also deals with class, race, and gender. On the positive side, this book might be so annoying that it would encourage a teen reader to do anything to avoid the many mistakes made by Lee Fiora. Lee had such a wonderful opportunity and as far as I can tell she wasted it all. This would make my worst read of 2011. This book was read for my F2F book club and I am expecting a lively discussion, so for that reason, it will make a good book club read.
    • 4/5
      After reading and feeling indifferent about Sisterland, I was prompted by many book lovers to check out Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep.Sooooo glad I did! I found a copy of Prep at a book warehouse and sped through the novel.Prep is the story of Lee, a midwestern girl who decides that for high school, instead of going to the local school, she wanted to go to a prestigious boarding school. Once she gets to Ault, she knows that her world will change and just be amazing.For the full review, visit Love at First Book
    • 2/5
      This is, in a nutshell, Lee Fiora's experiences attending boarding school near Boston after growing up in South Bend. It's more a collection of anecdotes than a single narrative, but that's pretty much what high school is after all: a series of events with no ultimate cohesion or story arc. Which is fine, as far as that goes, but I personally found this book absolutely excruciating most of the time, as Lee embodies many of my worst traits as a teenager. She's awkward and self-absorbed and petty and miserable. And as familiar as her attitude was to me, I had very little sympathy for someone who chose this life for herself. No one forced her to do this. But you know what? Part of me thinks this may be a book like Catcher in the Rye, where you really have to read it at a certain age. Maybe, had I been 16 when I read this, I would have really liked it. As a 34-year-old, I really didn't.
    • 2/5
      boring. too long. sloooooowwww
    • 3/5
      I like to think that while I'm well removed from high school at this point, I can still remember vividly the feelings of insecurity and loneliness, contrasted with those of the sometimes triumphs, that that particular institution has a tendency to engender. And because of this, I can very much sympathize with the narrator of Prep, Lee Fiora. But while I was certainly prone to the same insecurities that Lee experienced, her character takes them to an extraordinary level that I sincerely hope most other students don't experience. Lee is someone who is coming from a background very much different from those of the rest of her classmates as she is a student on scholarship, and combined with the ordinary teenage apprehensions and a major tendency to overanalyze everything, Lee is more or less reduced to a puddle at the slightest provocation within this book, and for this she becomes somewhat of a nuisance from time to time. For me, this nuisance caused me to outright groan at times, thus detracting from what could have been an enjoyable book otherwise.

      But aside from this, this book has much to recommend for it. While I never went to boarding school, much of Lee's experiences had parallels for me with my freshmen year of college, a year which I recall fondly. The difficulty with making friendships and the recognition of how special one is when you truly find it was eloquently put. The distress a casual crush can cause was explored well (a little too well for my tastes, but as a man, I suppose that's to be expected). And the embarrassment of failure and feeling like your family can no longer understand you because you've changed so much apart from them is something I believe anyone can relate to. I found the scenes surrounding Surprise Holiday, Lee teaching Conchita how to ride a bike alongside Lee's first introduction to Bob Dylan, and the evolving relationship between Lee and Martha to be particularly compelling.

      Ultimately, I wish that Lee had learned more from her experiences than she did. It felt like even upon reflection she derived little from her blunders, and too much was left unsaid. The last conversation she had with Cross I felt to be exceptionally true and well done, but I felt that there needed to be more of those as well. Lee ultimately addresses the overriding theme of her insecurity about her middle class stature only obliquely, and this to me was just a mistake on Ms. Sittenfeld's part. How easy it would have been for Lee to talk to Martha in the end about how she felt at Ault in terms of her class, and yet this never occurred.

      As a coming of age novel, I certainly enjoyed Prep for some of the moments of wonder that it conveyed. If Goodreads would allow half stars, this book would have been a solid 3.5. But ultimately the failure of Lee to evolve, combined with her annoyingly overanalyzing everything and her failure to really tell anyone aside from Cross face to face how she felt, rates this as closer to a 3 than a 4. Ms. Sittenfeld's prose is clean and exquisite at times, and so I may look for another book by her (especially considering this was her debut effort).
    • 4/5
      I don't know why I thought this was going to be ordinary chick-lit, but I was pleasantly surprised. It's an excellent, involving story covering Lee's 4 years at Ault boarding school. She's not rich like most of the other students, and she's from Indiana. She's introverted, insecure and fascinating. Very well-written.
    • 5/5
      I don't know who told Curtis Sittenfeld she could read my teenage diary. Especially since I never actually kept one.
    • 5/5
      Oh how I love this book. This may be my fourth or fifth reread, I've lost count. Lee Fiora as a main character may rub people the wrong way, but I feel like I've never known a truer representation of teenage angst. Ugh, Cross Lee are my complete high school love story : the uncertainty, the second guessing, the setting of rules that you want to be broken. UGH this book... Love. Pure love.
    • 5/5
      Set in a prep school, the book is told from the point of view of Lee, a scholarship student who feels isolated from those around her. Throughout the four years, you see how Lee gets on with her experience and how she tries to fit into her surroundings and how she deals with feeling so alienated from those around her. It's interesting since Lee is not a victim and not very sympathetic at times, but someone you could understand. I definitely recommend it.