Prep: A Novel

Curtis Sittenfeld

Sep 2019 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Jorjeana Marie

About this audiobook

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A modern classic of adolescent angst and ambition set in the world of prep school, from the author of Romantic Comedy and Eligible—“a tart and complex tale of social class, race, and gender politics” (The Boston Globe)
 
One of The New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of the Year
 
Lee Fiora is an intelligent, observant fourteen-year-old when her father drops her off in front of her dorm at the prestigious Ault School in Massachusetts. She leaves her animated, affectionate family in South Bend, Indiana, at least in part because of the boarding school’s glossy brochure, in which boys in sweaters chat in front of old brick buildings, girls in kilts hold lacrosse sticks on pristinely mown athletic fields, and everyone sings hymns in chapel.

As Lee soon learns, Ault is a cloistered world of jaded, attractive teenagers who spend summers on Nantucket and speak in their own clever shorthand. Both intimidated and fascinated by her classmates, Lee becomes a shrewd observer of—and, ultimately, a participant in—their rituals and mores. As a scholarship student, she constantly feels like an outsider and is both drawn to and repelled by other loners. By the time she’s a senior, Lee has created a hard-won place for herself at Ault. But when her behavior takes a self-destructive and highly public turn, her carefully crafted identity within the community is shattered.

Ultimately, Lee’s experiences—complicated relationships with teachers; intense friendships with other girls; an all-consuming preoccupation with a classmate who is less than a boyfriend and more than a crush; conflicts with her parents, from whom Lee feels increasingly distant—coalesce into a singular portrait of the painful and thrilling adolescence universal to us all.

About the author

Curtis Sittenfeld won the Seventeen Magazine fiction writing contest at age 16, and the Mississippi Review's annual fiction contest in 1998. Her writing has appeared in Seventeen, Fast Company, The New York Times magazine, The Washington Post, Salon, Real Simple, People, and on NPR's "This American Life." A graduate of Stanford University and the Iowa Writer's Workshop, she is the recipient of a Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award. Sittenfeld is a writer-in-residence at St. Albans School, and she lives in Washington, D.C.