Prep - Curtis Sittenfield

Once again, don’t trust book reviews, but only your friends’ opinion: charming friend had called me the night before meeting for our “anarchic bookshop dinner”, last Thursday, and told me that she would bring me the above mentioned book, thinking that I may like it. And yes, it wasn’t bad. A quick reading (courtesy of a rainy Sunday, I read it in an afternoon and finished it before 2 a.m.), and sometimes intriguing.
Simply, the story is that of Lee Fiora, girl from Indiana, who wins a scholarship for a prep school in Massachusets, and moves there for four years of her teenage life. And the rest is the usual: trying to survive in a high-class environment, trying to find friends, trying to be popular, struggling with Maths, conforming to the style of the school to the point that your own parents are not so smart anymore when you see them, and the discussions that follow because you have changed into another not-so-nice person for the sake of appearances, the relationship with the other sex…
Two things: one, the girl is really not cut up for that school, but only because she think so. My humble opinion. She doesn’t even try, and when she does, she changes herself and, head down, she runs into disaster every time and spoils any possibility she could have; predictable.
Second, come on! She has a crush on this guy for three years, and being the disaster she is, she ends up with him in her bed for 6 months? This is not real. But I am not making myself clear.
What I mean is that she is terrible, she barely speaks, she hides in the girls’ dorm for the weekend and for the parties, she avoids contact with almost everyone excluding her room-mate; she has this terrible behaviour with boys that even I, being even more shy than her when I was her age, did not have, and in four years she does nothing but live like some silent unseen bug in the corner of a room; she is not attractive in a physical way, and not even charming in an intellectual way, she’s a half-failure all over; and this is not told in a convincing way: while reading you think: come on, just leave the school! Or do something better that just staying there and ranting about things and people, and driving yourself crazy with imaginary situations!
Her description (the author’s) of the other students are quite stereotyped, so are the final two pages of each section of the book, which sound as if she thought that there had to be some moral to be explained at the end of the chapter, but it’s usually corny, easy, superficial.
I read that the writer won some literary prize when she was 16…Unfortunately, I also read that the rights of this book have been bought from Paramount..Ladies and gents, I’m afraid we will soon have a new “Dawson’s creek” (or maybe “Beverly Hills 90210”, since it’s a high-class set) on screen. Happy?