Prep

Lee Fiora is an intelligent, observant fourteen-year-old on a scholarship when her father drops her off at the prestigious Ault School in Massachusetts, her head filled with images from the school's glossy brochure in which boys in sweaters chat in front of old brick buildings, girls hold lacrosse sticks on pristine playing fields and everyone sings hymns in chapel. As Lee soon learns, Ault is a self-enclosed world populated by jaded teenagers whose expectations, values and social rituals are utterly unfamiliar to her. At first an observer of, then a participant in the hyper-vigilant, intricately demarcated life of the school, Lee eventually finds her own place in the pecking order - until a single act of spontaneous folly shatters her carefully honed identity. Prep is a sharp and lucid portrait of the pain and the excitement of adolescence, and a remorseless dissection of privilege and class in the cradle of the American establishment.