In my Crooked Little Lies review I complained about the proliferation of new books being compared to successful books like The Girl on the Train and Gone Girl, and yet I fell into the hype trap when I purchased Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll. The top review on Amazon compared this book to both Gone Girl and Prep, which just so happens to be one of my favorite books of all time, and with that comparison, I knew I had to read this book ASAP. I even added Luckiest Girl Alive to my Summer 2015 Reading List.
I should have listened to my own advice to avoid comparisons between books because I found few, if any, parallels between Luckiest Girl Alive and Gone Girl. I'd say the similarities stop with the inclusion of the word “girl” in both titles. I didn't find Luckiest Girl Alive to be the least bit mysterious, shocking, or enjoyable.
Synopsis: HER PERFECT LIFE IS A PERFECT LIE.
As a teenager at the prestigious Bradley School, Ani FaNelli endured a shocking, public humiliation that left her desperate to reinvent herself. Now, with a glamorous job, expensive wardrobe, and handsome blue blood fiancé, she's this close to living the perfect life she's worked so hard to achieve.
But Ani has a secret.
There's something else buried in her past that still haunts her, something private and painful that threatens to bubble to the surface and destroy everything.
With a singular voice and twists you won't see coming, Luckiest Girl Alive explores the unbearable pressure that so many women feel to have it all and introduces a heroine whose sharp edges and cutthroat ambition have been protecting a scandalous truth, and a heart that's bigger than it first appears.
The question remains: will breaking her silence destroy all that she has worked for or, will it at long last, set Ani free?
Let's get this out of the way: Ani (pronounced Ah-nee, and don't you forget it) is repugnant. I almost had to stop reading pretty early in the book because I disliked her so much. I actually laughed out loud in chapter two when I came to the following passage:
It's okay to be insufferable as long as you're aware that you're being insufferable. At least that's how I justified it to myself.
It begs the question: Is Ani actually any less insufferable because she knows she's a jerk? Yes, she's self-aware, but holy Batman is she ever unlikeable. I finished this book but, despite everything that Ani goes through in her short life, I found it incredibly difficult to sympathize with her. Ani doesn't appear to like anyone she knows, and that includes her fiancé. She spends a lot of time judging the women around her based on what they're wearing or what they look like. Ani's guide to pretending to be upper class is endless and she shares such nuggets like how important it is to say “Nice to see you,” instead of “Nice to meet you,” the first time you meet someone. In other words, Ani is vapid and annoying and I disliked her immensely.
While I was shocked by the major plot twist in Gone Girl, nothing in Luckiest Girl Alive shocked me. This book is billed as a mystery, but I'm not sure why. You learn about Ani's teen years in flashbacks, but it seems like more of a plot device because I don't think it worked to build suspense. Ani lives through more than her fair share of tragedy, but she endures so much that it almost seems unbelievable. I'm not saying there aren't people in the world who haven't endured all that Ani has by the age of 14, but I'm guessing their numbers are few and far between. Had we only dealt with one terrible event, then OK. But this book deals with two, one of which is a national tragedy* that makes the news here in the U.S. on an all-too-frequent basis, and the author chose not to delve into either tragedy or the ramifications too deeply. (I guess you could argue that Ani's terrible attitude is her way of dealing with all of her pain, but she seemed to have the same less-than-sterling attitude pre-tragedies.)
Overall, I gave this book 2 stars on Good Reads. I've read worse books, and I've read many better books. This book just doesn't live up to the hype, in my opinion. Despite all of the plot packed into this book, I couldn't bring myself to care about Ani or anyone else, and that's saying something considering the heavy topics that were tackled. I don't mind a terrible narrator if the story has redeeming qualities, but I couldn't find any in this book.
Luckiest Girl Alive was just a book that I read that I don't really recommend and probably won't remember in a week.
<SPOILER ALERT: DON'T READ BELOW IF YOU HAVEN'T READ THE BOOK!>
*I was in high school during the Columbine shootings, which are referenced a few times in this book. The school shooting that Ani lived through immediately made me think of that – how could it not?? – but the writing was so distant and vague and generally bad that I found myself reacting more to my own feelings about Columbine than to what the author was conveying. I felt like the author got this part of the story horrifically wrong.
