English Year 8 - Laurinda: Setting

Lucy Lam lives in Stanley, “a place where many people work in banking and advertising – that is, their mums clean banks and their brothers put Safeway ads into mailboxes”. It was not a place people strive to get in to, but rather struggle to get out of. For Lucy’s family, it was going to happen through sheer hard work and now possibly for her, through an opportunity at the prestigious ladies college Laurinda. Set in the 1990s, with numerous references to the icons of the time, and with an obvious absence of any social media, Pung demonstrates that while society might have changed significantly in the last twenty years, being a teenage girl has always been difficult. Especially if you attend Laurinda. The key to surviving adolescence is not forgetting where you came from, or the people who love you, but having a very clear focus on where you want to be.  

Why is Laurinda set in the 1990s?

In Alice Pung's own words: "I deliberately set the story before there was social media and cyberbullying, for three reasons. The first is that young adult readers are the most discerning and astute audience you’ll ever have. They can tell a false note a mile away, so if I set the book in contemporary times and got cultural references wrong or tried to ‘be with it’ in relation to social media, they would know I was trying way too hard.

Secondly, I wanted the girls to demonstrate their nastiness in person, physically, face to face. There’s a certain kind of courage in this – like how soldiers used to fight wars, bayonet to bayonet. They could not hide behind drones.   

Finally, I wanted to cement Lucy’s outsider status so the reader got a real sense of her complete alienation and disconnect from the school. I wanted the reader to hear her uninterrupted reflections on what this meant, to experience her working things out, thought by thought. This could definitely not be achieved if her inner monologue was constantly interrupted by her Facebook posts or tweets, which are never representative of a person’s true state of mind anyhow, just symptomatic of temporary feelings."