Good storyline and entertaining characters. ( )

Lee Fiora leaves home at 14 to attend an elite New England boarding school. She is neither rich nor beautiful nor very good at school. She also lacks emotional and social intelligence. She's hyper self-aware and attentive to everything that's going on around her, but she doesn't truly participate in life at Ault. She watches everything from the outside. So this book is not particularly fun, unless you enjoy the unbelievable agony of high school. It is fascinating, though. How Sittenfeld captured the craziness of what goes on in an adolescent teenager's head is beyond me. I'm glad a read A Separate Peace before this; they complement each other well. ( )

The first thing to note about the book is the cover. I'm not a judge-the-book-by-its-cover kind of person, but there's something intensely embarrassing about reading a book with an embossed pink belt on the cover. I ran into a friend while carrying my copy and he asked what I was reading: "not a chick-lit rom-com" I answered, defensively.

The only problem being, it kind of is. Lots of obsessing over what people are or aren't wearing, who is or is not dating whom and whether or not each character is popular. The attempt is to make it a self-aware, self-referential chick-lit rom-com, peppered with an introspective, if flawed protagonist.

Which brings us to the crux of the issue: this would be fascinating, were it new territory. However, it's far from it. The flawed but introspective teenage protagonist who makes sense of the intricate, unexplicable world called teenagehood has already been done, most notably and incomparably by [b:The Perks of Being a Wallflower|22628|The Perks of Being a Wallflower|Stephen Chbosky|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1313063835s/22628.jpg|2236198]. And also, while there's always room for another quality book in any genre, Lee Fiora has a lot more emphasis on the flawed than on the introspective. In fact, mostly, the best adjective for her is dumb. Its hard to imagine how she got into boarding school in the first place, much less on a scholarship. And every time she criticizes herself, you just want to agree with her: Yes, you're an idiot; yes you suck academically; yes you push away everyone who wants to be friends with you, of which there seem to be shockingly many, given that you're cruel to your friends, never make social overtures and push away everyone who wants to be friends with you.

There was an attempt at a message about family and how hard it is to leave your family as a teenager, but Lee's family was so much more flawed than she was that I found the fact that she ever talked to them at all just another annoying quirk of hers (her father slapped her across the face in public. Last I checked, child abuse is rather unforgivable and never excusable)

The bits that the book does well, on the other hand, it does very well - a sentence or two about the bond of a true friendship; the description of the sense of commingled sadness and joy when someone unexpectedly really and truly knows you; the episodic and fragmented nature of teenage experiences. ( )

Even though many of the characters were not really likable, they were interesting. The protagonist processed her life in such detail that at times it was tedious and repulsive, but I did want to know what happened to her. I did not learn as much as I would have liked to learn, but the author wrote so that I was often in suspense to learn of the next experience. I do not have private school experience, but I have been an adolescent, so there was much I could identify with. ( )

I really, really, really got wrapped up in this book and completely adored it. I never wanted to put it down. Prep made me very nostalgic for my own high school experience and for all those bittersweet unhappy-happy feelings that I experienced. I really enjoyed the writing. There are so many lines that made me think "Right! That's EXACTLY what it feels like!" but I've never heard it put into words quite like that. And I often find the frequency of those occurrences to be the most defining measurements of whether or not I thoroughly enjoy a book. (Meaning, I did enjoy this one--a lot.)

A small criticism ... sometimes the "Years later, when I think back on this experience" type of comments kind of threw me out of it--sort of ruined the illusion (though I know it was purely intentional on Sittenfield's part for it to read sort of memoir-esque in this way). I'd rather have just remained caught up in that current moment (because I adored all those moments of the book so, so much), without the comments on the character's hindsight.

It's so good. It's so worth reading. Very real. I think it's similar to Catcher in the Rye in that anyone reading it can COMPLETELY jump in the shoes of the main character because of these horrible and wonderful human experiences she's going through as a teenager.

I think the only reason I nixed a star from the rating is for the last page. It wasn't completely incongruous from the rest of the book or anything, but because I spent more than 400 pages getting to that last one, I think I'd expected something different from Sittenfield's "moral" or message, or whatever. Something that was, perhaps, less basic. ( )