Sittenfeld, Curtis.

Prep : a novel / Curtis Sittenfeld. - 2005 Random House Trade pbk. ed. - New York : Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2005. - 420 p. : port. ; 21 cm.

Includes a Reader's guide and Reading group questions and topics for discussion.

Thieves -- All school rules are in effect -- Assassin -- Cipher -- Parents' weekend -- Townie -- Spring-cleaning -- Kissing and kissing.

In the late 1980s, for reasons even she has difficulty pinpointing, fourteen-year-old Lee Fiora leaves her middle-class, close-knit, ribald family in Indiana and enrolls at Ault, an elite co-ed boarding school in Massachusetts. Both intimidated and fascinated by her classmates, Lee becomes a shrewd observer of, and ultimately a participant in, their rituals and mores, although, as a scholarship student, she constantly feels like an outsider. By the time she's a senior, Lee has found her place at Ault. But when her behavior takes a self-destructive and highly public turn, her hard-won identity within the community is shattered. Lee's experiences, complicated relationships with teachers, intense and sometimes rancorous friendships with other girls, an all-consuming preoccupation with a classmate who is less than a boyfriend and more than a crush, are both a psychologically astute portrait of one girl's coming-of-age and an embodiment of the painful and thrilling adolescence universal to us all.

ISBN: 081297235X (pbk.) 9780812972351 (pbk.)

Subjects--Topical Terms:
Teenage girls--Fiction.
Preparatory school students--Fiction.
Self-destructive behavior--Fiction.

Subjects--Geographic Terms:
Massachusetts--Fiction.
Indiana--Fiction.

Index Terms--Genre/Form:
Psychological fiction.
Bildungsromans.

LC Class. No.: PS3619.I94 / P74 2005

Dewey Class. No.: 813/.6