It’s easy to empathise with Lucy as she experiences a range of different prejudices, from becoming the ‘pet project’ of the “cabinet” – a mod-squad of three elite girls from wealthy families who are used to maintain the status quo. As part of her development, she begins to perceive how the power structures at the top of the school support those at the bottom. (70)Īs the the ‘nice’ bullying gets out of hand, hurting other students and teachers, Lucy begins exploring her own sense of self, her values, and what it will mean to be ‘accepted’ at Laurinda. This outfit was made for a seated life, a life of air-conditioning, long lunches and weekends away in semi-rural cottages. This was an outfit not made for messing up, or for hacking away at cow carcasses, or for hiding in back rooms threading needles. she struggles to fit into the new world of Laurinda, while continuing to look after her younger brother, “The Lamb” to help her mother who works long hours doing piecework in the garage, and maintain contact with her old friends. Lucy’s voice is a rich one that develops through the story as she begins to question the standards that are so deeply embedded into the society she’s thrust into, and that create tension for her as she becomes an “ambassador” both for the Chinese/Vietnamese community within the school, and a representative of the value of hard work within her community at home:Īt school I may have looked like a try-hard, super-polished version fo everyone else in my immaculate uniform, but in this neighbourhood I stood out like a beacon, a sign to small business owners and factory workers that the next generation would belong to a different class. Her home in Melbourne’s socially disadvantaged Western Suburbs is a world apart from the privileged students she begins to interact with at her new school.

Lucy is from a Chinese-Vietnamese family, and is more surprised than anyone when she wins the scholarship over some of her more hardworking co-students at the multi-cultural local Catholic school she has ben attending. The novel is structured into a series of letters written as a kind of ongoing confession from Lucy to Linh, Lucy’s old friend, whose disapproving reception becomes increasing obvious as the book progresses.

The is something universal about fifteen year old Lucy Lam’s dislocation as she tries to navigate the clique-iness, the odd social mores, and the subtle bullying that takes place at Laurinda, a prestigious private school to which Lucy has received the first equity scholarship. It would be a rare reader that didn’t feel an affinity for the protagonist in Alice Pung’s charming coming-of-age story, Laurinda.

Laurinda by Alice Pung