Class Is In Session: Campus Mysteries

I will continue to read everything Jesse Q. Sutanto puts out. I love her range from dark YA (The Obsession) to fun, comedy-of-errors adult novels (Dial A for Aunties) that feature Chinese Indonesian characters and culture. While the sequel to Dial A for Aunties, Four Aunties and a Wedding, releases soon. The New Girl is more like The Obsession, although for me personally it was less dark/obsessive.

The New Girl was an audiobook that I hit play on and immediately got invested in the main character and ended up inhaling the book. Lia Setiawan has just transferred to a prep school, Draycott Academy, thanks to a full ride track scholarship. But from the second she steps on campus things aren’t great, starting with a student being literally dragged from the school. While Lia’s instinct is to go help her, the other students are just filming and laughing.

And then the bullying starts, because she’s there to take one of the track team spots and another student isn’t going to give up her place. Plus, the teacher that dragged the student out of the school is making her life difficult. There’s blackmail, a dead student, and Lia has to figure out what is going on or she’ll lose her scholarship and any chance at college…

This hit on a lot of things I like, including dark academia, a lead I was rooting for, and the balance many Americans live between being from an immigrant family and growing up in the U.S.

(TW suicide, detail/ talks about eating disorders/ disordered eating from stress, lack of money)

Technically we get two campus mysteries for the price of one since this is set in the past and present.

In the present day, Eve has been sent by her mother and stepfather to a boarding school—her stepfather has never allowed her to feel like a part of the family. She’s the new kid and the situation isn’t great, so when she gets tapped to be a part of a secret society in school, after friending a cool girl, she doesn’t question what joining the Fives may mean.

In the past, we remain in the same school but find ourselves in the early ’60s during the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the panic over nuclear war. Enter a teacher who decides to have a group of students spend four days in a nuclear fall out shelter at the school as an experiment. Not all six students will make it out alive.

And in the present, anyone who dares ask or speak about the event is immediately threatened into silence…

For fans of past and present mysteries, watch as both timelines take you into two different teen girls’ lives and time periods, waiting for it all to connect.