Praise & Reviews

“A gorgeous and charming debut that belongs with the fine coming-of-age stories of our time.” —The Boston Globe

“Hilarious and excruciating…Lee’s incisive vision of herself and others is her downfall but also—as this richly textured narrative suggests—her greatest gift.” —The New Yorker

“Speaking in a voice as authentic as Salinger’s Holden Caulfield and McCullers’ Mick Kelly, Curtis Sittenfeld’s Lee Fiora tells unsugared truths about adolescence, alienation, and the sociology of privilege. Prep’s every sentence rings true. Sittenfeld is a rising star.”
–Wally Lamb, author of She’s Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True

“Critics have compared author Curtis Sittenfeld to Salinger and Plath. But her novel Prep, about boarding school, pegs her as a name to watch in her own right.” —Time

“Casts an unshakable spell and has plenty to say about class, sex and character…One of the Ten Best Books of 2005.” —The New York Times

“Funny, excruciatingly honest, improbably sexy, and studded with hard-won, eccentric wisdom about high school, heartbreak, and social privilege. One of the most impressive debut novels in recent memory.”
—Tom Perrotta, author of Little Children and Election

“The novel never slows, due to Sittenfeld’s perfect pacing and almost reportorial knack for describing what it’s like — psychologically, logistically — to be 15…It seems likely that Lee Fiora will be compared to Holden Caulfield, and it is high time someone wrote the girl’s boarding-school novel.” —The Washington Post