Sophie Gee

Really holds up.

My goodness, it's good.

100%.

I should say, because we are all about the commitment to truth telling in this podcast, Jonty, I was winding you up.

My favourite high school movie is Clueless.

Clearly, it's the greatest Jane Austen adaptation ever made.

Yeah, nice.

I'm Sophie G. I'm hot.

I'm cute.

I've got it all going on.

I'm the homecoming queen.

I stand up in the middle of school assembly with my boombox and I dance wildly to classic rock.

This week, I don't think anyone's going to have guessed what the book is.

This week is Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld.

So we're rounding out our series on high school novels.

And we've so far been located in Britain, but we're jumping across the Atlantic this week and several decades.

And we're in 1990s Massachusetts with the American novelist Curtis Sittenfeld's first book, Prep.

Early on in the novel, little Washington, the soon to be expelled African-American student who is there on full financial aid, tells the novel's heroine, Lee, how she knows that Lee, too, is also a financial aid kid.

is that she doesn't have a flowery bedspread.

Welcome to American Preppy Culture, which is going to be one of the big focuses of our episode today, and to be totally honest with you, one of the major reasons that I really wanted to talk about this book.