This was yet another of the books that my friend Janet had recommended when it was just 99p on Kindle, so I bought it. I picked it up at the beginning of June and took quite a while to read it, because it is quite long. I did enjoy it but I wouldn't rush out to read something else by Curtis Sittenfeld even though I know people rave about her.
The book is set at an elite boarding school in Massachussetts. Lee Fiora is fourteen when she arrives and way out of her depth. She's from the middle of nowhere in Indiana, from a normal family. She was clever enough to get a scholarship to Ault, the school, but when she gets there she's just one clever kid in a whole raft of them. And everyone else is rich and from the 'right' family. They have the right things like flowered bedspreads but Lee doesn't - something which marks her out as a scholarship student.
The book spans all four years of Lee's high school career at the school. She has a huge crush on Cross Sugarman, the most popular boy in her year. One day late in her freshman year she gets to spend the day with him and some friends, which intensifies her crush. She knows he'll never look at her, though. She has just one friend, who she ends up sharing a room with for the next three years.
The most popular girl in the school is Aspeth, who eventually asks Lee for a haircut and she ends up being the hairdresser for the whole school. She is thrilled that people want to talk to her but eventually realised that this job is a bit beneath her.
I liked the setting of the school and thought it was so cloistered and had its own language which showed the 'them' and 'us' of it all. I did think it was a bit too long and I would have liked just a bit more plot, but I understand that's not overly the point of the book. In all I'm giving it four out of five.
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