Lucy and Linh

I really enjoyed this. Lucy was likable, relatable, and she was smart and funny. I laughed, teared up, and felt relieved at the end. Even better: no one was cartoonishly evil in this. We're shown realistic bitchy highschoolers but nothing over the top.

This book is like the movie Mean Girls, but if Mean Girls was set in Australia at a private junior high school, and the Plastics were “good girls” who were actually crueler and sneakier and one of them was really racist, and new girl Cady was an immigrant.

So like, the first half of this book was more about the transfer of Lucy from her old junior high to Laurinda via a scholarship to the private school, and trying to make friends in a new setting, and the viciousness of these mean teenagers who like, got a teacher to quit and steal things from their peers, and general bitchiness. At one point I thought, damn I do not miss high school. I was more of a floater in school, I generally got along with most people, but I remember stupid teenage drama, and probably one of the circles of hell is being trapped as a teenage girl forever.

The second half is more about Lucy's involvement with the Plastics the Cabinet, and how they work to manipulate her and make her feel simultaneously like a charity case the school took on, and also less-than for not following blindly everything they think or say, and the process of finding your own voice, standing up for yourself, etc. This half had a lot more elements of being ashamed of where you come from, dealing with other people's perceptions of yourself and your worth based on the things you have or don't have, and there's also a sneaky undercurrent of “but we're not racist!” from a lot of Lucy's classmates and their parents that just really sucked. Something later in the book was described as being like a spider bite, where you know it hurts but you can't prove it because there's no mark, and a lot of the meanness in this book is like that.

Being a young teenager was well-described, in that a lot of complaints about YA seem to be about the characters behaving uncharacteristically for teenagers, but you're in Lucy's head and mostly see her at school or with her family. There's a section specifically where she's like, at this age you might know how you feel, but you don't yet have the communication skills to connect how you're feeling with bigger concepts, and so you're frustrated by not being able to properly communicate the way you want to — which was just a lovely way of putting it, especially against the backdrop of having to translate for her parents, who don't speak much English, but little is said about their own communication concerns, because they're generally in a community where they know other people who speak the same language as they do, so it's just ... less concerning (from Lucy's perspective anyway).

There's also this beautiful few sentences about how Lucy identifies and identified herself that changed between her old school and new school that really surprised me, as part of the device for this book. It's subtle and doesn't change much, but it was also really good.

Anyway, long story short, I'm glad I read this, I enjoyed it and I'm probably going to be thinking about this for a couple of days. 3.5 stars.

Read Harder: #ownvoices set in Oceania, and an epistolary novel

Alice Pung's prose was absolutely lovely, her descriptions as unique as they were apt. I enjoyed reading about Lucy's family, and I appreciate how this book dealt with issues regarding both race and socioeconomic status.

Unfortunately, I'm not a big fan of the Mean Girls style plots, so overall, I didn't enjoy this one as much as I'd have liked. But if that's your thing, I definitely recommend it!