Palish

Isn't it fitting that an author by the name of Curtis Sittenfield would write a novel about a prep school, a novel in which the narrator's crush has the name Cross Sugarman? Sittenfield, a woman by gender, (I checked) reads like a hybrid of Donna Tartt and Helen Fielding. The narrator's experience will darken your perspective of the self-selecting world of New England boarding schools (where the class prefect always goes to Harvard), but you'll still want her to kiss the boy, despite the hard-set lines of class and popularity. In the end Prep falls well within the fish out of water/coming of age genre. But after all, who needs to go to an excluisve school to feel alienated?

The New York Times named this novel one of the ten best of the year, and I'm not sure I agree. Lee, the narrator, moved through her traumas episodically, and the plot has no real climax or conclusion. It's like watching a BBC TV program.