Book Review: ‘Prep’ by Curtis Sittenfeld
You know how there are those formative novels that you read as a teenager, fall so hard for them that you put on them a pedestal and continued to recommend them for 15 years without having re-read, and then you finally do re-read it and it makes your heart hurt? ‘Prep’ is that book for me.
This campus novel thrilled me at 15/16 and I was completely taken in by Sittenfeld’s easy prose, the fear and hesitation of our protagonist, Lee, but this 2005 novel hasn’t aged very well.
Lee Fiora is a shy fourteen-year-old when she leaves small-town Indiana for a scholarship at Ault, an exclusive boarding school in Massachusetts. Her head is filled with images from the school brochure of handsome boys in sweaters leaning against old brick buildings, girls running with lacrosse sticks across pristine athletics fields, everyone singing hymns in chapel. But as she soon learns, Ault is a minefield of unstated rules and incomprehensible social rituals, and Lee must work hard to find - and maintain - her place in the pecking order.
It sounds like the perfect dark academia adjacent novel: a cult classic, an early 2000s campus novel, and a book beloved by teenage Sophie, but we were in for a shock when we read this for our podcast, The Dark Academicals.
I straight up regret putting this forward for the podcast because I really wouldn’t have been mad about preserving it in my teenage years.
‘Prep’ is dripping in racism, racial stereotypes, sexism, fatphobia, and a wide-ranging lack of representation from the very beginning that anchored it in the damaging 00s that we grew up in - there’s nothing about fatphobia that I would have been surprised by as a teenager.
There are real moments of connection and realisation throughout the novel, moments when Lee’s experiences and feelings and thoughts really resonates with how I sometimes felt as a teenager which is what hooked me back then, even if looking back on them they are achingly sad, but it was soured by all of the many issues of representation and racism.
“I wanted my life to start - but in those rare moments when it seemed like something might actually change, panic shot through me.”
Lee is a depressing heroine to follow for over 450 pages. She doesn’t join in or try to connect with anyone, she has no passion for her studies or Ault itself, she is suspicious of the friends that she does accidentally make, and all of her focus is on Cross Sugarman, her crush. And he’s not worthy of her attention. The way he treats her in this book is awful and heart-breaking to read about, and sadly probably a fairly relatable experience for a teenage girl, but this isn’t a YA novel trying to connect with that age group, it’s an adult literary fiction novel. A bleak one.
“But I never thought of who he wasn’t, I never had to explain or defend him to myself, I didn’t even care what we talked about.”
It’s the racism, the racial stereotyping and the treatment of people of colour in the novel that really made an impact on this re-read and put a bad taste in my mouth. There are only two Black characters in the novel: Little Washington is kicked out of the school for being a thief, and Darden is a star basketball player. Sin-Jun Kim is a rich, Korean character who is under enormous academic pressure and speaks in broken English. And this is just in the first few chapters - it’s woven throughout the novel and it’s so disappointing, especially as it’s such a cornerstone of more modern campus novels.
‘Prep’ was a real disappointment to me on this re-read - it’s a book of its time and encompasses the self-loathing and prejudice of being a teenager in the 00s. I’m really sad to knock a book off of a 15 year old pedestal.
Written by Sophie
