Alice Pung’s previous work includes two acclaimed memoirs Unpolished Gem (2006) and Her Father’s Daughter (2011). Sharp and thoughtful, Laurinda is Pung’s fiction début, a Young Adult novel about teenage girls struggling behind a façade of congeniality. Lucy’s first-person story is told by way of a letter to the irreverent ‘Linh’. Pung offers wry and original images: a fork held upright in the hand of the school principal is ‘a disapproving metal exclamation mark’. Throughout this compelling novel, Pung maintains a sense of unease. The reader expects not just the small missteps and hazards that Lucy encounters in her new school, but a real tragedy.

‘Throughout this compelling novel, Pung maintains a sense of unease’

Pung’s depiction of mid-1990s working-class family life is sympathetic. She nails the voices of Lucy’s pragmatic parents, narcissistic peers, and tyrannised classroom teachers whose helplessness in a school like Laurinda is stark. Following the ‘incident that altered the course’ of their year, their handsome teacher Mr Sinclair condemns the girls’ behaviour and privilege, noting that they ‘won’t be insulated forever’. Lucy comes to realise that, to succeed at Laurinda, cultivating true integrity must come first.

The epigraph cites Kurt Vonnegut’s line that ‘Life is nothing but high school’, a realisation about politics, power, and popularity that resonates in Laurinda.