**** The Antidote To Harry Potter **** (Prep - Curtis Sittenfeld)

Member Name: malibu_jenny

Product:	Prep - Curtis Sittenfeld
Date:	03/10/09 (33 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Beautifully realistic and thought provoking.

Disadvantages: A little sad at times.

Lee Fiora, from South Bend, Indiana is thirteen years old when she applies to boarding school. The dreamy idea of boys and girls in cashmere sweaters, brick buildings and lawns is a glimpse from a glossy brochure and a far cry from her local high school with its low academic results and peeling lino. Before she realises the impact of her daydream, she has been offered a scholarship to Ault School and begins life there at the age of fourteen, leaving her ordinary, noisy family far behind.

For me, this is a book that began beautifully. Her observations of her room mates, her wealthy peers and the rituals of formal dinner and chapel set the scene through to the release of white balloons at her senior graduation. Lee is thoughtful and intelligent and for the first three quarters of the book I could empathise overwhelmingly with her need to fit in and her teenage concerns. Time and again I read a page or two, stopped and thought to myself that there was no way anyone could write these events down without having experienced them first hand. The story seems so indescribably real and alive, the relationship with her parents told with a mix of love and embarrassment in only the way a teenager could.

Lee's parents accepted her decision to go to boarding school, but she says herself that this is not the same as believing it to be a good idea. The gulf between Lee on her scholarship and the fee-paying students is evident but not something to ever be spoken outright; talking about money is considered distasteful. It's not something she can avoid thinking about though, as she observes expensive pillowcases used for pranks, three thousand dollar laundry bills and clothes bought simply to wrap alcohol in. And it's not just the money and family status, which make her an outsider, but her loss of confidence.

She describes herself at home in South Bend as outgoing and bubbly, but her nerves at starting school change her. Perhaps Lee's observations themselves are the problem? I couldn't say for sure whether she judges others because she feels judged or whether it's the other way round. The parts of the book I enjoyed most were the ones where she is on the edge of joining in, where she experiences fleeting moments of recognition from the other students.

Further into the book, Lee's retreat into herself and resentment of others make for heartbreaking reading. My empathy with Lee faded to disagreement and I found myself willing her to pull it together. She believes her friend Martha to be someone close who cares enough to be honest, but I thought Martha boring and unsupportive. At times I even felt their friendship to be the very reason behind Lee's social demise. I longed for Lee to pick up her relationship with the students outside her insular little world and to become a participant for better or worse.

The overwhelming feeling that this book left me with was that Lee wasted her early teens. I realise that American High School students leave school later than those in the UK, that they can't legally buy alcohol until the age of twenty-one. I also realise that a posh private boarding school is doubtless a sheltered world and that this book is not set in the here and now. But even when I take these factors into consideration, I can't help but compare the drabness of Lee's life against the subdued fun of her counterparts at Ault, let alone the.underage clubbing, inappropriate boyfriends and general lifestyle of a modern British teenager.

My advice for Lee would be this; get angry with a boy who spurns you, dance and drink and shout. These actions are by no means everything in life, but introspection and contemplation, homework and a fear of making mistakes never made anyone truly happy. To behave badly for a few years is nothing against being sad and sorry for the things you never did.

This is an amazing book, especially if you regard the tinge of sadness as necessary for any coming of age story rather than a reason to cry into your bag of Maltesers. It's colourful and exciting and begging to be made into a film; totally deserving of the Orange Prize For Fiction award.

Summary: You won't put it down until you finish it.