Curtis Sittenfeld's is doing well at No. 9 on the New York Times' Best Sellers list with his debut novel Prep, which tells a story of teenage angst at its best.

Lee Fiora is just beginning her high school career in the Boston boarding school Ault — a school known for its high caliber teaching and the wealthy families that send their children there — and already she feels out of place. She is not from the upper-class; instead she is from a South Bend, Ind. family located in, what her peers call, "the LMC," the lower-middle class.

Ault was supposed to help Lee's dreams come true. She thought that the world would be open to her once she got into Ault, but instead she finds that she is out of place. Rather than have her parents proven right that the Midwestern life and home is the best place for her, she begins to adapt, but she will never adapt fully.

Ault personifies the high school life, but a hyper-sense of it, with all the stereotypical popular, beautiful kids, the geniuses and the outsiders. Lee is an outsider, possibly sabotaging herself with her insecurities, which seem to grow each year.

Right off the bat, Lee doesn't get along very well with her roommates: Dede, a girl striving to be popular, is a follower of the most popular girl in school; or Sin-Jin, a Korean girl who hardly speaks English and has problems with depression. But they tolerate each other throughout their Ault careers. She finds a friend in a girl named Martha, her roommate for the next three years, but Martha seems to care for her more than she reciprocates.

Lee also develops a crush on Cross Sugarman, the school's basketball star. She lusts after him in secret, but the relationship they develop in their senior year is racier than what she first pictured.

Lee spends her high school years in a cloud of self-doubt under everyone's radar and is ashamed of where she is from.

Of course, four years of high school — especially in a book about a girl coming-of-age — will have too much material to cover to fit into 403 pages. Sittenfeld chose the most important aspects in her character's life to cover.

Instead of focusing on the boring things like class, Sittenfeld chooses to show Lee's relationships, a few choice occasions and her thoughts and observations, which take up a majority of the book.

There are fun instances like a school-wide game called Assassin, which involves "killing other students" by getting assigned a person and sticking a sticker on them without anyone else knowing. However, there are other instances that make you feel sorry for Lee, like the relationship with her parents and an unfortunate experience with a reporter.

Prep is hard to put down, but it can get confusing at times. At certain points, it is grown-up Lee reflecting on what is being said. There are no introductions when grown-up Lee is stepping in and readers have to guess. There are also no date markers in the book, so as to which decade the book takes place is a mystery. Most likely it's the 90s, since a cell phone is mentioned, but it's not certain.

Grade: B

This article appeared in The Marquette Tribune on March 31 2005.