I was delighted to receive my first book to review for the Transworld Summer Reading Challenge. I had chosen ‘Prep: a novel’ by Curtis Sittenfeld which describes a fourteen year-old girl’s entry into an exclusive boarding school, far from her home in South Bend, Indiana.

The cover blurb compares Sittenfeld’s writing to Donna Tartt, to George Eliot, even to Salinger, and I had already read and loved one of her novels. This book was longlisted for the Orange prize. So, despite the mixed reviews (it got both 1* and 5* reviews on Amazon) you can imagine how excited I was to get stuck in.

This book opens like this: ”I think that everything, or at least the part of everything that happened to me, started with the Roman architecture mix up.”

Wonderful. A promise that something has happened and we are going to find out what. Two weeks later I am halfway through the book and I am still uncertain as to what actually did. I have peered at the end few pages, something I never do, and am still unilluminated as to what the Roman architecture mix up had to do with anything. I am also uninspired to soldier on. I am calling it a day.

So then I thought I would watch some paint dry.

So, in my review, I would like to explain why.

Firstly character. The protagonist’s character is well developed, but only in that she is aimless and uninteresting. I want Lee to have an objective. I want her to want something. But she wanders through her schooldays cooly noting what happens to her (and what doesn’t). She doesn’t seem interested in being popular. Romance would be quite nice, but not so much that she would either make a move, or agonise over her inability to pluck up the courage. She doesn’t even seem to want to go home to the safety of her parents. Everything she experiences happens in the passive voice. Everything is low-burn except her antipathy. When a character doesn’t have a real goal, it’s hard to get behind her and cheer her on.

The second let down for me is the plot which is, let’s say, muted. There was very little driving me on to turn the pages, wondering what would happen next. In addition, the timeline jumps forwards every now and then, missing out whole chunks of action, but with no real explanation as to why. I wanted some action, some intrigue, some meat. Not only is the teenage voice in the novel authentically exasperating, but I felt my annoyance slipping out to the author as well. I felt that she also was behaving like a teenager, echoing the egotistical way adolescents assume that we are interested in what they have to say, whether it is interesting or extraordinary…or not.

The writing was very pleasant; what I would have expected from Curtis Sittenfeld, and it kept me going as far as I got. But in the end it couldn’t sustain me. As a reader I either needed to engage more with the main character, or see some real action. One or the other would have been fine, but the best candidate would have been character. There were many times when Lee’s character could have been developed, stepped up – the Assassin game, for example. She could have made mistakes and learned from them and become someone I was proud to know. I longed for that for her, but for too long. At this point in the book we should see some progress in the character, but it seems her author has kept her from growing. I found this hugely frustrating.

This book would certainly be the kind of thing I would have bought, especially having read American Wife. I found American Wife absorbing: I loved the depth of character of Alice, her desires and her motivations.

Not so with ‘Prep’.  The main character is not only unlikeable but uninteresting, the other characters are nicely drawn but peripheral and the plot is thin. All we are left with, it would seem, is setting.

If you want to read about a teenager’s experience of boarding school in the USA, this book could be for you. Other reviewers assure me that this is a great depiction of that life. But sadly, this book was not for me.

If you want GREAT Sittenfeld, buy American Wife.