Lia Setiawan is elated when she earns an athletic scholarship to the exclusive Draycott Academy. With dedication and her new spot at Draycott, she sees her college aspirations of running track for Stanford assuredly within her reach. As soon as she bids her mother goodbye and walks through Draycott’s doors, she’s struck by the overwhelming dissonance of having left the familiarity of the modest home she shares with her doting, Indonesian single mother and entered a strange, new world in which her much wealthier classmates toss around designer clothing, drive sports cars, and fly to Las Vegas in their private jets on a whim.

Lia’s brief orientation to her new environs (courtesy of her affluent RA Beth) is abruptly interrupted by the dramatic and forceful removal of former student Sophie Tanaka. Lia is aghast at the sight of campus police dragging Sophie away as an eerily inexpressive teacher with a bloody face, Mr. Werner, and a crowd of their apathetic peers look on in amusement. When Lia turns to Beth to intervene, Beth firmly dismisses the incident as nothing more than the troublemaking antics of a disgraced ex-student with a drug habit and instead, sympathizes with Mr. Werner for apparently being attacked by Sophie. Unsettled by all of this, Lia silently wonders what kind of madness she just walked into. Her unease only increases when she discovers an angrily scrawled message written on the wall of her dorm room, proclaiming Mr. Werner’s guilt.

Before she can process the realization that she now occupies Sophie’s old room, her hunger forces her to go to the dining hall where she meets Danny Wijaya, a handsome Chinese-Indonesian student she’s immediately drawn to and strikes up a friendly rapport with. Hearing that Lia misplaced her student ID, Danny kindly offers to swipe her into the dining hall with his own ID. Lia is grateful and intrigued by their meet-cute. She joins Beth and her friends for dinner and thinks perhaps her experience at Draycott won’t be so bad after all.

However, her doubts and creeping sense of dread return the next day when Beth introduces her to Draycott Dirt (DD), the school’s anonymous gossip app over which students post and rate secrets about one another. Within hours of her arrival, Lia is somehow already the subject of a series of cruel posts appraising her level of attractiveness and speculating as to whether she’s there to replace Sophie or TrackQueen, her unintentional new nemesis. Things don’t get any better when she’s warned off by her teammate Stacey Hoffman and ostracized by Mandy Kim and the rest of the track team during her first practice. After practice, she’s alerted to even more derision directed at her on DD. Feeling thoroughly demoralized and in need of relief, Lia reports to her English Lit class, only to find that Mandy Kim is there and Mr. Werner is the instructor.

Over the course of an alarmingly eventful semester, Lia becomes progressively entangled with this cast of characters—swept up in their excesses and caught in the sinister underside of Draycott Academy. 

The New Girl offers a fun, hard-to-put-down read with quick pacing and an interesting plot that is slightly hampered in places by a few weakly defined character motives and convenient resolutions to dire situations. Sutanto’s attentive use of humor, suspense, and her protagonist’s voice buttress the story. 

LOGLINE: A rising track star, newly transferred on a coveted athletic scholarship, quickly gets mired in a mounting web of secrets, cheating scandals, digital gossip, cyberbullying, and murder at an elite Northern California boarding school.

MOOD: A fizzy and comedic thriller that allures, shocks, and divertingly confounds. Dark academia presented through the lens of a multicultural YA mystery, The New Girl is a compulsive reading experience that feels like Gossip Girl meets Cracks and Insatiable, mixed with a bit of Lost and Delirious and an earthbound sprinkling of Wednesday.

TITLE: The New Girl

AUTHOR: Jesse Q. Sutanto

GENRE: Contemporary YA Fiction, Humor, Suspense, Crime Thriller, Mystery, Dark Academia

LENGTH: 505 pages (ebook edition); 368 pages (paperback edition)

PUBLISHER: Sourcebooks Fire, an imprint of Sourcebooks

PUB DATE: 1 February 2022