The Set-Up Girl Q&A - Meet Amalia!
- Allen & Unwin
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
We chat with Amalia from The Set-Up Girl by Sasha Vey.
The only thing worse than having a secret crush on the hottest boy in class? Setting him up with your best friend!
We chat with Amalia, the main character in Sasha Vey's The Set-Up Girl to get all the tea first hand. Read our Q&A with her below.
A&U: Hi Amalia! Thanks for speaking with us. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Amalia: Hi! There’s not much to… tell? Really? I’m in year twelve – which I’m trying not to think too much about. I like to read, but I don’t really have a favourite genre, though I know I don’t love domestic thrillers (you can thank my Tetka Mojca for helping me learn that about myself…). Mostly I hang out with my family or with my best friend Mae, who is beautiful and kind and just generally the best person ever.
A&U: You’ve mentioned you have a family book club – is there a particular book you’ve read with them recently that has been a favourite? What was it that stuck out to you about it?
Amalia: I don’t think I’ve had a favourite book yet. My favourite thing about book club is kind of that we read lots of really random books – like, one session we’ll read some bleak bit of Gothic fiction, and then another we’ll read a “great American novel”. We were meant to read one of those at our last book club session actually, but Tetka Sabinka (my aunt) – who was the one who suggested we read it in the first place, by the way – ended up asking us to cancel that week because she had some tennis thing she couldn’t miss.
I think we’re doing Emma next, which I had to read for school like two years ago. That’s a favourite, I guess – even though we haven’t technically done it at book club yet. I liked Emma’s character, though she frustrated me sometimes with how bad she was at telling what people were actually feeling.
A&U: Do you have any good book recommendations to share?
Amalia: At an early book club one of my cousins suggested we do Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones, which I ended up liking a lot even though it’s technically for kids. I guess kids books don’t just have to be for kids – and Howl’s Moving Castle was a really good example of that.
A&U: Speaking of family – yours is Slovenian, right? How does the Slavic culture affect your everyday life? Is it very different to Australian culture?
VL: Before I started writing the series, I made a big list of all the elements I loved in stories, and the monster world was born from some of those loves (time-travel, families with powers, unusual perspectives …) After that, I spent a lot of time brainstorming and building the world and the characters. There are many, many characters and worldbuilding details that didn’t end up in the books, but I wanted it to feel as real as possible in my head before I put pen to paper.
A&U: Joan is the main POV character throughout the series, but if you had to write from another character’s perspective for a while, which one would you choose and why?
Amalia: Sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s “Slovenian” and what’s just “my family being weird”, but I guess being Slovenian is like… well, for one, having mum always complaining that she has to drive ten trillion kilometres away just to reach the nearest church with a priest that does a Slovenian service, and having that priest also being the priest for a bunch of other small ethnicities. It’s people mixing up Slovenia with Slovakia, or expecting that I can speak Russian – which, okay, there’s some overlap but like, it’s not even from the same branch of Slavic languages?
Being Slovenian also means yum desserts you can’t find anywhere except at home, and also my dad always being able to find some Eastern European tradie to cut us mates’ rates for whatever building project at home he insists on doing half of himself anyway (that’s how we ended up with a slightly dodgy pool out back). So I guess it’s a lot of different things, some little and some big. And it’s hard to say what’s “Slovenian” and what’s “Australian” and what’s just life. But whatever it is, I like it, because it’s mine.
A&U: Tell us about your bestie Mae! How did you two become friends? What is it like to grow up with someone you are so close to?
Amalia: Mae and I met when we were little. Her mum’s mum is Slovenian, so we were dragged out to church and to community events when we were kids, and just ended up sticking together. We’ve also grown up around the corner from each other, so it was really easy to move from seeing each other in community to hanging out at each other’s houses. Mae is honestly… she’s the best. We’re not super similar personality-wise – Mae is way more confident and good with people – but we just mesh really well. She’s like my sister, basically – though not actually, because I do have a sister and she’s way more of a pain in my ass than Mae is.
A&U: Do you have any advice for teens going through the chaos that is their final year of high school?
Amalia: I’ve only done one term so far, so I’m not sure what advice I can give. Maybe: think about what you want to do after school? I definitely haven’t yet and it’s starting to stress me out. It doesn’t help that Mae knows exactly what she wants to do already, because of course she does (and when Mae decides something, it’s going to happen).
You can hear more of Amalia's story in The Set-Up Girl,
which is available now wherever books are sold!
The Set-Up Girl
by Sasha Vey
The only thing worse than having a secret crush on the hottest boy in class? Setting him up with your best friend! A fresh and contemporary romantic comedy for fans of Alice Oseman, Tobias Madden and Sophie Gonzales.
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