Prep

Curtis Sittenfeld's debut novel Prep is a painful narrative of four years at a New England prep school featuring a midwestern narrator named Lee. Sittenfeld went to Groton, and gives the New England boarding school culture a big middle finger in the novel (to be fair, the people I've known from Groton seemed to have survived intact, so I took the novel's acerbity with a grain of salt). It's interesting in the way adolescent novels are interesting, but by the end I just wanted it to be over. It's definitely a book for adults, and high school sex and all of its accompanying drama was the aspect of the book that finally threw me on the "not liking it" side of the like line. The narrator is hateable, but also occasionally sympathetic. By the end, though, I didn't really care what happened to her. It's a strange novel to read as a grown up--it's too late to be a cautionary tale, and from adult distance the struggles of the narrator seem pretty paltry. It's constructed pretty well, but not written in a way that wows.