Click the link for reviews of two other books that won 2014 Scholastic Asian Book Awards.
It is not easy setting a story in an Asian country with a multicultural population like Singapore or Malaysia. Authors who have grown up in such diverse societies know how powerful it is for readers, particularly young impressionable ones, to see their race, culture, creed and gender being positively represented in the books that they read. So there is a tendency for such authors to try to create and include characters of different races in their writing.