Sophie Gee

So maybe we can take that as a cue to think about how Siddhantel structures the book.

Who's the sort of...

Hot male character.

There's a great moment where the heroine, whose name is Lee, says to Cross, where are you from?

And he says, the city.

And she says, Boston, because that's the closest city to the school.

And he says, New York.

Like there is only one city in America.

No, I love that.

I'm going to make a really strained point.

Ever since I came up with this idea that Prep is somehow in conversation with The Great Gatsby, I then started trying to think about other more outlandish claims I could make about other great American novels that Prep is trying to kind of grapple with.

Let's see if we can make a check out for Moby Dick.

So Moby Dick is the great story of the impossible pursuit of the phantasm or the bogeyman that will never be caught, the uncatchable target, the white whale.

So who's the white whale?

Is it Cross Sugarman or is the white whale Harvard?

the nature of an elite American educational institution and possibly all American institutions is that one is going after the very thing that one can never attain.

Love a wool sweater.

Alt had been my idea.

I'd researched boarding schools at the public library and written away for catalogs myself.

Their glossy pages showed photographs of teenagers in wool sweaters, there they are, singing hymns in the chapel, gripping lacrosse sticks, intently regarding a math equation written across the chalkboard.