LoveReading Says
LoveReading Says
The influence of Malory Towers as a child made me wish I went to boarding school instead of a boring day school. Midnight feasts, all your friends with you in your dormitory; surely it must be like one big slumber party? Reading Prep would have cured me of that longing. At the beautiful and prestigious Massachusetts school, Ault, things aren't all jolly hockey sticks and pillow fights. Instead we're transported to an institution with a rigid social hierarchy and taken on a dark teenage journey. Worth a read for the spot on adolescent voice of the main character, Lee Fiora.
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Prep Synopsis
Curtis Sittenfeld's sparkling debut is set in an American boarding school, a hotbed of privilege, ambition and neurosis, every bit as snobbish and competitive as anything dreamed up on this side of the Atlantic. Lee Fiora is an intelligent, observant fourteen-year-old when her father drops her off at the prestigious Ault School in Massachusetts; she leaves behind her affectionate family in South Bend, Indiana, her head filled with images from the school's glossy brochure, in which boys in sweaters chat in front of old brick buildings, girls hold lacrosse sticks on pristine athletics fields, and everyone sings hymns in chapel.
As Lee soon learns, Ault is quite unlike anything she has previously experienced, a self-enclosed world populated by jaded teenagers whose expectations, values and social rituals are utterly unfamiliar to her. At first an observer of, then a participant in the hyper-vigilant, intricately demarcated life of the school, Lee eventually finds her own place in the pecking order - until a single act of spontaneous folly shatters her carefully honed identity.
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Press Reviews
Curtis Sittenfeld Press Reviews
'Smart, witty and sensitive . . . Any girl who's ever felt like an outsider will be drawn to troubled Lee, a scholarship teen at a posh boarding school’ InStyle
'An addictive portrait of adolescence - The OC meets Donna Tartt’s The Secret History with flashes of Clueless’ Observer
‘Sittenfeld writes with confidence, her dialogue rings true . . . and her observations range from witty to surprisingly funny, sometimes absurd’ Herald
Author
About Curtis Sittenfeld
Curtis Sittenfeld is a graduate of Stanford University and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop where she was taught by Marilynne Robinson. As well as four bestselling novels, Curtis has also written for publications such as The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, The Guardian, Glamour and Time magazine, where she interviewed Michelle Obama.
Author photo © Josephine Sittenfeld
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