news
Torontoist Reads Prep
Last week, Curtis Sittenfeld’s coming-of-age novel Prep appeared on bookstore shelves, and this week we picked it up, mainly because we are a huge sucker for a good angsty boarding school story, particularly one that destroys any lingering nostalgia for high school.
The story is narrated by Lee Fiora, looking back on her high school days from the comfortable vantage point of her late twenties. Lee’s adolescence was neither terribly traumatic, nor particularly enjoyable, and this ordinariness, and the skillful way that Sittenfeld captures it, is part of what makes Prep so remarkable. Lee’s adolescent bewilderment and self-consciousness are so cringingly familiar, so honest. Her classmates are recognizable archetypes from any high school in the universe, but Sittenfeld’s skill with detail ensures that every character rises above his or her archetype. Sittenfeld finds in Lee’s voice a peculiar blend of wisdom and naivete, and her prose is full of sharply accurate observations about all aspects of the high school experience, and the occasional jarringly well-phrased truth that you yourself didn’t even realize you’d been thinking all along.
With the candy-coloured textured belt on the front cover, Prep looks like it should be a very different book – it looks flighty and fluffy, another self-indulgent novel about high school. But it is none of these things. It is almost impossible to believe that a novel about high school could be subtle and nuanced (possibly the least subtle time in anyone’s life), but that is precisely what Sittenfeld has created here.