Lucy and Linh

From the publishers:

Lucy is a bit of a pushover, but she’s ambitious and smart, and she has just received the opportunity of a lifetime: a scholarship to a prestigious school, and a ticket out of her broken-down suburb. Though she’s worried she will stick out like badly cut bangs among the razor-straight students, she is soon welcomed into the Cabinet, the supremely popular trio who wield influence over classmates and teachers alike. 
 
Linh is blunt, strong-willed, and fearless—everything Lucy once loved about herself. She is also Lucy’s last solid link to her life before private school, but she is growing tired of being eclipsed by the glamour of the Cabinet.
 
As Lucy floats further away from the world she once knew, her connection to Linh—and to her old life—threatens to snap. Sharp and honest, Alice Pung’s novel examines what it means to grow into the person you want to be without leaving yourself behind.

My thoughts:
For the tween female reader. I was hoping this was more Amy Tan female fire and sassiness and less whiny, colonized, silenced Asian.

This just brought up the bitter taste I had in my mouth when I went to Australia for an education conference and found the Australian national education folks so racist and colonizing even in the 21st century. The whites in charge still feel like their role is to save the Asians through the power of Australian, white education. It made me more sick that the Asian countries around Australia seem to buy into this same attitude. I shutter to think about what is going on with the Aboriginal people in Australia, but what do I know as just another brown educator on a very small island in the middle of the Pacific?