American Wife

By Curtis Sittenfeld

Alice was just an ordinary girl from an ordinary family in an ordinary town. Her folks were neither rich nor poor. Alice was neither beautiful or ugly, neither brilliant or stupid. If fate had been a little kinder, she probably would have spent the rest of her life in her home town, married to a local boy, maybe teaching school, with a couple of kids, leading an ordinary life.
But fate stepped in and everything went awry and Alice went on to have the kind of life that very few ever experience: First Lady of the United States.
Alice had a crush on a boy in her high school and she was sure he liked her too. But driving to a party one night, Alice ran a stop sign and hit another car, a car that was being driven by the same boy she had a crush on. The boy was killed. Alice naturally felt terribly guilty. Her guilt drove her to seek a life away from her home town. She ended up in Chicago, where she met the man who would be her husband and who would become the President of the United States.

I picked up this book at a used book sale, not knowing anything about it. But I gradually came to realize that Alice was based on First Lady Laura Bush. In the book, Alice always carries a torch for the boy she killed and while she loves her husband, in her way, she never forgets that boy and she never stops wondering what kind of life they could have had together. Marrying Charles, Alice gets swept along on his quest to make his mark in the world. She doesn't agree with his politics and she doesn't like the public life but she does what is expected of her. She doesn't make waves and she behaves like a good little wifey should.
This book started out pretty good but after Charles & Alice are married, the story slows way down. At that point it was so boring that I stopped reading it for several weeks. Charles is not an appealing character and it was a puzzle as to why Alice stayed with him, especially since he was a conservative and she a liberal. The book doesn't go into a lot of detail about the political years and takes up the story of the presidency only in the second term.
So I did enjoy the first part of the book but after Alice and Charles get married the story was a lot less interesting.

Prep

By Curtis Sittenfeld

Lee wants a different life. A middle class kid from Indiana, Lee wants to be more. She is pretty smart so she is able to earn a scholarship to an East Coast prep school. The scholarship won't cover all her expenses but her parents are willing to pay for what the scholarship doesn't. So at age 14, Lee goes off to boarding school.
It doesn't take her long to figure out that most of the students at the school come from money. And that kids like Lee who don't come from affluent backgrounds are the exception.
Teen years are years when most kids want desperately to fit in. But now Lee, who formerly was a popular, outgoing person, finds herself an outsider. She just doesn't feel comfortable around these rich, seemingly self-confident upper class teens. She becomes silent, withdrawn, and angry.
Yet, oddly, she chooses to stay. Year after year, never feeling quite at home, always conscious of the gap between herself and the others, she stays on. She makes a few close friends but never dates, never attends dances, never lets on to her fellow students just how lonely and sad she really is. She is always on the fringes, a hanger-on, closely observing but keeping her distance. She is never really accepted as one of the gang, probably because she is never able to relax and just be herself. She is always on guard, always trying to protect herself from imagined rejection.

This was an OK book. The first half was better than the last because the novel seemed to stall and not really go anywhere towards the middle of the book. It doesn't pick up again until Lee becomes involved with a boy she has been yearning for since first attending that school. Also, I didn't really like Lee, I found her to be very off-putting. But other than that, the book is a close look at life at a boarding school for children of the wealthy, a glimpse of the lives of the privileged few.