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I've just finished Laurinda by Alice Pung, and it's brilliant and biting and engrossing. A poor ethnically Chinese girl (whose family fled Vietnam to come to Australia) wins an "Equal Access" scholarship to a very posh private girls' school. There she learns that this superficially glossy and perfect-looking environment hides undercurrents of maliciousness and manipulation that verge on the horrific. She has to learn to navigate this environment and find out who she is and who she wants to be.
It could be labelled YA just because it's set in high school and includes a coming of age story, but it reads as an adult book with crossover appeal to me. On the surface it's a Mean Girls novel, but really it's about class and race and elitism and corruption and what matters in life, and about how even a little bit of social power can be enticing yet dangerous. There is also a powerful examination of 'benevolent' racism, how it functions, and how it feels on the receiving end. Highly recommended. (Since "best book of the year so far" doesn't mean much at this point!)
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