Prep

The first thing to note about the book is the cover. I'm not a judge-the-book-by-its-cover kind of person, but there's something intensely embarrassing about reading a book with an embossed pink belt on the cover. I ran into a friend while carrying my copy and he asked what I was reading: “not a chick-lit rom-com” I answered, defensively.The only problem being, it kind of is. Lots of obsessing over what people are or aren't wearing, who is or is not dating whom and whether or not each character is popular. The attempt is to make it a self-aware, self-referential chick-lit rom-com, peppered with an introspective, if flawed protagonist.Which brings us to the crux of the issue: this would be fascinating, were it new territory. However, it's far from it. The flawed but introspective teenage protagonist who makes sense of the intricate, unexplicable world called teenagehood has already been done, most notably and incomparably by [b:The Perks of Being a Wallflower 22628 The Perks of Being a Wallflower Stephen Chbosky http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1313063835s/22628.jpg 2236198]. And also, while there's always room for another quality book in any genre, Lee Fiora has a lot more emphasis on the flawed than on the introspective. In fact, mostly, the best adjective for her is dumb. Its hard to imagine how she got into boarding school in the first place, much less on a scholarship. And every time she criticizes herself, you just want to agree with her: Yes, you're an idiot; yes you suck academically; yes you push away everyone who wants to be friends with you, of which there seem to be shockingly many, given that you're cruel to your friends, never make social overtures and push away everyone who wants to be friends with you.There was an attempt at a message about family and how hard it is to leave your family as a teenager, but Lee's family was so much more flawed than she was that I found the fact that she ever talked to them at all just another annoying quirk of hers (her father slapped her across the face in public. Last I checked, child abuse is rather unforgivable and never excusable)The bits that the book does well, on the other hand, it does very well - a sentence or two about the bond of a true friendship; the description of the sense of commingled sadness and joy when someone unexpectedly really and truly knows you; the episodic and fragmented nature of teenage experiences.