Sophie Gee

I'd trade away my family for this glossiness.

I pretended it was about academics, but it never had been.

Marvin Thompson High School, the school I would have attended in South Bend, had hallways of pale green linoleum and grimy lockers and stringy haired boys who wrote the names of heavy metal bands across the backs of their denim jackets in black marker.

But boarding school boys, at least the ones in the catalogs who held lacrosse sticks and grinned over their mouth guards, were so handsome.

And they had to be smart, too, by virtue of the fact that they attended boarding school.

I imagine that if I left South Bend, I would meet a melancholy athletic boy who liked to read as much as I did.

And on overcast Sundays, we would take walks together wearing, inevitably, wool sweaters.

It's good.

Yeah, exactly.

There's various candidates for who's doing the thieving, but it turns out that it's Little Washington.

And the moment where they have a conversation right after this is discovered is quite interesting.

And I actually want to read a little snippet of it because I think it gives us a glimpse of why Sippenfeld makes this really smart decision of setting up a conflict about race as the opening conflict of the novel.

The first chapter is called Thieves, which I think is an excellent title.

Obviously, it is about thieving.

But I think it's a good idea because it's also getting at this notion that if you're poor or if you're black or if you're not a member of the upper class white East Coast elite, you are a kind of outlaw.

You're already a kind of criminal underclass in these sorts of institutions.

And one of the paradoxes of American elite education, which, as you know, Janti, is a topic incredibly dear to my heart.

I haven't said yet, by the way, that we're now squarely in the

Sophie G land in this with talking about prep not because I went to an American East Coast boarding school but because having had my whole life teaching at Harvard and Princeton I mean this stuff is deeply familiar to me but used to be incredibly unfamiliar and one of the weird things about American East Coast schools both high schools and colleges is that they're mind-bogglingly expensive if you're paying the sticker price you're paying a hundred thousand dollars a year for your kid to go to these places and

But what they have are these enormous endowments that mean that probably like 40% of the kids aren't paying their way at all.