A refreshingly honest and insightful view of one girl’s experience at an exclusive girls’ high school.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Good for: People who like reading about clash of cultures.
Not good for: People who would rather not revisit the experiences of high school.
Lucy Lam, a 15 year old girl of Chinese descent from the wrong side of town, is given the opportunity of a lifetime- a scholarship to an exclusive girls’ high school. An opportunity that her hard-working immigrant parents, are extremely proud of, and her old school friends are extremely jealous of. Being educated at the school increases Lucy’s chances of later attending university and getting a good job, lifting Lucy and her family out of their socio-economically deprived suburb. Lucy worries that she won’t be able to keep up academically at her new school, but she soon discovers that is the least of her worries. Plunged into a world of privilege, snobbery and inadvertent racism, Lucy is completely out of her depth. When she becomes friends with “The Cabinet”, a powerful trio of girls who rule the school in despicable ways, things become shaky and Lucy is in danger of leaving behind everything she has ever known and loved.