Author: Curtis Sittenfeld
Translator: Jin Lee
Publisher: Gimmyoungsa
584 pages | 149 * 219 * 37 mm /761g
| Important! Please read before you order! |
| >>>This book is written in Korean only. |
About This Book
Curtis Sittenfeld’s debut novel, Prep, is an insightful, achingly funny
coming-of-age story as well as a brilliant dissection of class, race, and gender
in a hothouse of adolescent angst and ambition.
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.
From The New Yorker
Any feelings of nostalgia for adolescence should be dispelled by the
exacting intimacies of this first novel. Lee Fiora, a scholarship student at the
prestigious Ault School (not Ault Academy, as her parents embarrassingly refer
to it), negotiates her days there in a blaze of self-consciousness that is, by
turns, hilarious and excruciating: "I believed then that if you had a good
encounter with a person, it was best not to see them again for as long as
possible." And yet she becomes an expert on the rituals that govern the rarefied
microenvironment in which she finds herself: the students' fondness for
catchphrases like "therein lies the paradox" and "LMC" (lower middle class); the
taboo against enthusiasm for anything other than sports; the fact that the
school always sings "God be with you till we meet again" at chapel before
breaks. In the end, Lee's incisive vision of herself and others is her downfall
but also - as this richly textured narrative suggests - her greatest gift.
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