Reviews with content warning for Vomit - The New Girl

High school sophomore Lia Setiawan arrives at Draycott Academy on an athletic scholarship. Surrounded by her overly wealthy classmates, she feels totally out of place. After watching a classmate get dragged off campus and no one does anything, she tries to uncover Draycott's dark secrets, while dodging all the threats trying to stop her. This novel is about cheating, corruption, murder, bullying, violence, drugs and unethical teachers.

One thing I really enjoyed about the book was seeing the role that culture and heritage played in Lia's life. She is half Indonesian and half Chinese-Indonesian, and there are a lot of interactions with people she connects with or on the negative side, who have a racist attitude. There are also sprinklings of Indonesian and Mandarin dialogue.

Overall, The New Girl is an amazing teen thriller that will please fans of books like The Good Girl's Guide to Murder. I had a lot of fun reading this book and couldn't put it down.

There were moments when I was screaming at the main character not to do something she was about to do. I love the manner in which the author depicts Lia's feelings of guilt and how it affects her decision-making.

I received this ARC in audiobook format and loved the narrator's voice. She was very good at changing her voice depending on which character was speaking.

Anyway, you should read it if you like crime mystery thrillers, Lia's experience being Indonesian and Chinese-Indo, twists and turns that keep you on edge.

Reasons you probably won't want to read it: the story concludes abruptly, there is a lot of rich teen drama, sometimes the characters are one-dimensional (their only characteristic is being bully).

TW racism, bullying/harassment, casual peer pressure, substance abuse, mentioned drug dealing, overdose, eye trauma, implied eating disorder, threat of violence in a relationship, strangulation, drugging

Content Warnings

sarahmreads's review

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dark mysterious tense fast-paced

2.5

Lia is the new girl at Draycott Academy, an elite boarding school that she hopes will be able to earn the track scholarship of her dreams. However, when her move-in day consists of a student being dragged away from the school by the police, it's clear to see that not everything is what it seems at Draycott. Will Lia survive the year?

It was so hard to get into the first half of this book. While it did move at an extremely fast pace that I really wasn't expecting, so it was hard to catch up. It was kind of like trying to jump on a treadmill that's already at its fastest speed. The introduction to the school barely lasted like 10 pages before Lia is shown her room and the drama begins. Once I got a good portion into the book, I finally managed to pick up on the pace of the story.

The plot was very much Ace of Spades and Mean Girls, but not really in the best way. There were so many plot twists, but a lot of them came off as pretty predictable based on the nature of the story. And this story was basically "rich people suck, power to the lower class!" I can't really speak on the authenticity of the Chinese-Indonesian and Asian representations as I am not of these backgrounds. I will say that the one queer character in this story felt very forced. It was like "I said that to you because I like you" and it's never brought up again, because Lia is not queer. Lia also looks away from a stray boob at one party and it kind of just rubbed off the wrong way to me.

Everyone was SO PETTY it was unreal. The bullies had absolutely no depth to them besides "hey we're the mean girls and we love to see you suffer." In fact, almost every other character felt too basic. Lia was basically defined by her track and her own depression and anxiety from what happens over the course of this book. Half the time I swear she was crying or just horribly lying. I also wasn't a huge fan of her inner dialogue or her actual dialogue. Overall, the characters weren't really believable or likeable.

Probably the only real thing that kept me going in this story was seeing how far some extremes would go, because those would be quite amusing although they really didn't make the most sense.

The New Girl is just another rehash of every typical new girl boarding school dark academia story that was just a disappointment and a drag despite being fast-paced.

I received a copy of this story as an ARC from NetGalley. Any and all thoughts and opinions are my own.

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