Book review: Trauma beneath a picture perfect life

I must begin my review of Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll with a disclaimer: after I finished it, I was totally confused. Not because the story is muddled — it is reasonably clear, ironic title and all. But I wasn’t sure how I felt about its heroine Ani, the allegedly luckiest girl alive. On the one hand, Ani is the kind of person I avoid in real life the way I avoid public toilets. She always has an eye to the main chance — perfectly made-up, perfectly dressed, perfectly bitchy, and perfectly fake, all so she can get what she wants.

On the other hand, Ani does have a reason for being that way, which gives the book’s title its irony. This makes her vulnerable enough for me to want her to win through, even though there is actually nothing about her that I like. What a horrible place for a reader to be in.

Still, it’s much less horrid than Ani’s position as the luckiest girl alive, with her life and future all figured out down to the perfect old-money fiancé and massive emerald on the ring finger, but with a past she needs to escape. When the book opens, Ani has apparently come a long way from what she was: TifAni FaNelli from a tacky McMansion on the outskirts of a small town, with a social climbing mother and a father who couldn’t care less about his wife and child.

I say apparently, because when you go into her flashbacks, you realise she’s just the same as she was when she first walked into the prestigious Bradley School as a 14-year-old: a seeker of popularity and wealth via influential friends and designer clothes, and a peer pressure victim for being so desperate to get into the right social circles.

Every bit of Ani’s life is planned: what she will wear, what she will do, what she will say, who she will hang out with. And she’ll do whatever it takes to implement those plans. Now cut to TifAni walking into Bradley School for the first time, aware that she must have people to sit with at lunch right away, just so she doesn’t begin her life there as a loser. There isn’t much difference between the old TifAni and the new Ani, except perhaps for cynicism.

On day 1 at Bradley, TifAni finds herself with a crowd of people who are weird but not so peculiar that she’s damned for life. But she’s also angling to hang with the popular crowd, and so she’s up for anything — even things that, deep inside, she knows she’d rather not do.

And when one bad decision leads to another and then to a firm dismissal from the popular crowd, TifAni is forced to return to her original bunch of weirdos, which ultimately leads to an event so completely horrifying that even though you read about it in the papers almost every day, you still cannot imagine it. Which is why, now that she’s all grown up, TifAni becomes Ani. Her past must be erased.

Or must it? Midway through the book, you realise you don’t know what Ani actually wants, because though she’s doing her best to wipe out her past, she’s also agreed to take part in a documentary about that completely horrifying event at Bradley High.

No one can figure out why she wants to do that, especially her old-money fiancé. Is it to finally get the truth out — but if it is, why now, considering that rock on her ring finger? Is it to test the limits of her ambitions — could Ani actually be less mercenary than even she knows?

Is it to test her fiancé’s feelings for her — well, he’s never been very sympathetic about what happened to Ani in high school. Is it to face her school tormentors? Get back in the life of her kind — and sexy — English teacher? You don’t really know Ani’s motives until the very end. And even then, you wonder because… well, she isn’t a very nice person even if she has reason to be that way.

I quite looked forward to reading Luckiest Girl Alive when my editor asked if I’d like to review it, though the title did make me a little cautious about starting the book. There have been too many alleged thrillers with not very likeable heroines since Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, and most have the word “girl” in the title.

But Luckiest Girl Alive is nothing like those books — it isn’t even a thriller, though the author does pull off quite a shock somewhere towards the end. Instead it’s a not too badly written cross between a coming-of-age story and a character study; not exactly compulsively readable, but you do want to know what happens at the end.

And you do wonder, after you finally put the book down, how victims of peer pressure, however willing they were at the time, manage to cope with the silly things they’ve done, and manage to grow out of their shame. I wouldn’t recommend this book to you heartily, but if you can borrow it to read, go right ahead.

Kushalrani Gulab is a freelance editor and writer who dreams of being a sanyasi by the sea