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A review by asimilarkite
Lucy and Linh by Alice Pung
4.0
#1 in the "Sara is catching up on book reviews series"
Before I picked it up, I kept reading that this book is basically Australian Mean Girls. And yes, it is kinda that. But it's also more than that. It goes deeper than Mean Girls, delving into issues of race and class. I read this book a long time ago, and what sticks with me about it is how Lucy is treated by her new "friends" at her fancy rich boarding school. She comes from the other side of the tracks -- and she's treated as a charity case, an exotic other, and a fetishized ideal. Because the whole thing is first person from her perspective, you really feel what it's like to move from a poor neighborhood school where most of the kids look like you to an affluent private school where you're VERY much a minority.
I really like that this is a realistic high school story without a romance. I'd recommend it to people who like perhaps more literary realistic fiction, like The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau Banks.
Before I picked it up, I kept reading that this book is basically Australian Mean Girls. And yes, it is kinda that. But it's also more than that. It goes deeper than Mean Girls, delving into issues of race and class. I read this book a long time ago, and what sticks with me about it is how Lucy is treated by her new "friends" at her fancy rich boarding school. She comes from the other side of the tracks -- and she's treated as a charity case, an exotic other, and a fetishized ideal. Because the whole thing is first person from her perspective, you really feel what it's like to move from a poor neighborhood school where most of the kids look like you to an affluent private school where you're VERY much a minority.
I really like that this is a realistic high school story without a romance. I'd recommend it to people who like perhaps more literary realistic fiction, like The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau Banks.