Prep - Curtis Sittenfeld

Very interesting read!
The story begins with an ambiguous girl named Lee who has been thrown into a completely new and unfamiliar culture. She moved from small town, Indiana to a private, wealthy boarding school. (Ault) which she attends on a scholarship. Lee suffers from a culture shock; lacking the social, cultural and economic capital necessary to fit in to this very wealthy upper class institution. She comes off as awkward, sexually ambiguous, and confused. As I read, I really felt somewhat anxious at times (when she was reading her architecture report to the class) intrigued, and confused-much like I was experiencing life through the eyes of a teenager again. On top of the normal teenage anguish and alienation that is expected, Lee's experience is multiplied by her situation. We watch Lee struggle as she tries to adapt new social skills, which force her to completely reconstruct her old set of skills that have proven to be non transferable and useless in this environment. She is a foreigner in every way at this school.

"It had already been obvious to me that I was different from them, but I'd imagined I could lie low for a while, getting a sense of them, then reinvent myself in their image. Now I'd been uncovered. " (P. 6)

Only upon meeting Gates does she attempt to try and fit in somehow. She sees Gates as someone in the middle; not too popular, yet not too unpopular. She can talk to her and learn from her, which she does. Despite learning that flowers are good and ear piercings signify femininity, Lee is discovering her sexuality. Upon meeting Gates for example, she describes her as "very attractive: not pretty exactly, but striking, or maybe handsome." This really made me laugh because, yet again, I was reminded of high school and the process of figuring out your own identity, and how you identify with others. This mixed up description shows that Lee is bonding to another person for the first time at school, and is left confused by her connection to Gates (the line between attraction and friendship can be tricky when your a teen). Of couse, we learn later in the text that this attractive quality she sees in Gates is just simply rooted in friendship, as evidenced by her "real sexual attraction" to Cross.

----->I was confused by the term prefects' while I was reading. I'm not sure what this means when it is used to describe the other students at Ault.

----->I would like to tlak more in class about identifying with the character. I know I identified with the feeling of being a lost teenager in a new place while reading this story, and I would interested in seeing how the class related too, if at all. Its not everyday that we remember what it was like to live as a teen.