The new girl by Jesse Q. Sutanto

Lia Setiawan has just entered Draycott Academy on a scholarship and is desperate to live up to her family’s expectations to be successful on the running track and in class. However, corrupt teachers and toxic social media make life in the prestigious boarding school extremely difficult; bullying and racism are rife and a culture of drugs and cheating is firmly entrenched.

Billed as a mystery/thriller, The New Girl involves a series of over-the-top escapades narrated by the self-absorbed Lia as she makes a series of poor choices that propel her from one disaster to another including clashing with the reigning track queen, confiscating a dealer’s drugs, breaking into a teacher’s room, hiding in his car, exposing a cheating scandal, attempting to frame a rival classmate and accidentally killing a teacher. Entertaining rather than believable.

The plot does involve a number of serious social issues but they are allowed to go unchecked, rather than being addressed by students or staff. I found it farfetched that a school administration would allow social media to get so out of hand, and turn a blind eye to corrupt staff and cheating students, all problems that are central to the plot.

Lia and several of her peers are of Indonesian/Chinese descent and cultural references and snippets of conversations in Bahasa Indonesia and Mandarin add a layer of interest to the story, but the characters were somewhat typecast; mean girl, computer nerd, scholarship student, gorgeous boyfriend, incompetent police. As the narrator and a poor judge of character, Lia is unable to take the reader past these initial stereotypes and it is hard to feel for the privileged characters and difficult to believe the lavish situations that they get themselves into.

As a prequel to Sutanto’s The Obsession, this is an easy read with a farfetched but entertaining plot and characters you will love to hate.

Warnings, drugs, death, language, eating disorders.

Themes: Racism, Bullying, Boarding school, Social media, Drugs.

Margaret Crohn