Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld is the story about Lee Fiora, a high school age girl from South Bend, Indiana who decides when she is in 8th grade that she wants to go to Ault, a private boarding school in the Northeast. She gets admitted on scholarship and then has four years of angst trying to figure out who she is and how she will fit into a world of rich kids who come from completely different worlds.
Lee is very self conscious, introverted, and not very socially adept and yet somehow she survives.
Prep is a coming of age book, but, perhaps more than that, it also is a commentary on Lee's self- conscious struggle with class issues. Lee is well aware that she is what is derisively referred to at Ault as "LMC" that is Lower Middle Class. It is Lee's class consciousness as well as her adolescent struggle to create a social identity for herself that gives this novel its creative tension.
We don't like to talk about social class in the United States. It is glossed over as we struggle with other "politically correct" conversations about race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, age, religion, money. The subtext for most of these conversations, rarely mentioned, is social class. Social class is nervously laughed at when mentioned in "redneck" jokes or jokes about "trailer trash". Lee is neither a redneck nor trailer trash, just a LMC who really doesn't fit in at a place like Ault and knows it, but she is tolerated and eeks out a condescending acceptance by her peers until the day she graduates.
When she graduates after 4 difficult years, she knows that most of these high school fellow students will not be life long friends. They can't be. They will go on to lives quite different defined by circumstances and mind sets that Lee has had a glimpse of but will never fully participate in.
If you are interested in coming of age stories, about exploring the vision quest of adolescence, and considering the influence of social class on one's definition of self and society, then I recommend this book to you.
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