‘Luckiest Girl Alive’ by Jessica Knoll was an interesting read. As someone who loves young adult novels (even though this wasn’t one), I enjoyed the mix of main character Ani’s present-day, mid-twenties life coupled with flashbacks that led to an understanding of who she is as a person now based on her scandal-riddled past.
TifAni FaNelli is what every ‘Sex and the City’-loving viewer wishes they could be – successful, attractive, and poised to marry a wealthy, good-looking, well-bred guy. With Manhattan as her home, the world seems to be her oyster. Yet the past haunts her, and it all is coming back pretty strongly through a documentary being filmed about her old high school and all the goings-on that made her past so unbearable, yet made her so motivated to propel herself toward a better and brighter future.
The young adult scenes, when Ani (what she goes by in the present day) is a mere fourteen years old, struggling with her identity and how to best fit in at a new school, is truly eye-opening. She makes friends, garners enemies, and finds that sometimes the two can get mismatched. Figuring out how to best differentiate between the two becomes harder and harder as more and more issues begin to occur.
Being in the popular crowd tends to take a toll on even the most confident. Since Ani sometimes even called herself out on being too eager to please the in-crowd, she sets herself up for situations that breed trouble. However, she is certainly the victim, despite the way her mother and some others make her feel guilty for giving in to peer pressure as it relates to drinking and boys, a combination that doesn’t serve to propel her to further popularity when one night as the new girl goes terribly wrong. Her life begins to spiral out of control, and the one friend (Arthur) she had made before trying out the popular crowd is more like a “frenemy” at this point. Her talks with Arthur lead to more trouble, when a terrible tragedy rears its ugly head at her elite school.
Ani’s past and present are intertwined through the switching off of the chapters from past to present and vice versa. The narrative, in my opinion, became more compelling as the story progresses, and by the halfway point, I was anxious to read more and the pages went much quicker than earlier on in the novel. Some of the secondary characters in Ani’s young adult life as well as her adult life seemed unimportant to me, and I sometimes had a hard time keeping track of exactly who they were and why they were relevant to her story, but at the same time, they didn’t take away from the main plot. Her relationship with her fiance, Luke, in the present day, had its ups and downs, as she questioned her relationship with him, despite feeling he was the “best” thing for her.
‘Luckiest Girl Alive’ was a provocative and telling read about how the past can creep up on you even when you think it’s “out of sight, out of mind.” I recommend this novel to those who want to read a realistic tale of seeming inadequacy, the struggle to fit in, and reinvention when it seems all but possible.
You can find ‘Luckiest Girl Alive’ by Jessica Knoll here.