Review: Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll

Title: Luckiest Girl Alive
Author: Jessica Knoll
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Publish Date: May 12, 2015
Source: Owned

What's the Story?:

From Goodreads.com: "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."

My Two Cents:

There was a ton of buzz about this book during the summer and I was anxious to read it. A lot of comparisons were made to "Gone Girl" and after having read "Gone Girl," I have continuously been on the lookout for a heroine or rather an antiheroine as it were that comes close to Amy in that book. Ani in this book is not necessarily cut from the same cloth but she still has an incredibly dark side. I really wish that I hadn't gone into this book with so many comparisons to "Gone Girl." It's sort of my own fault for focusing so heavily on that but so much was made of the connection. I think I would've gone into this book with a different mindset had I not been expecting something else. That being said, this book is a book about a woman who is so affected by some of the difficult things that she went through as a highschooler that she's built her entire life around making sure that she will never have to face that kind of humiliation again.

The story goes back-and-forth between the past and the present so we get a glimpse of what Ani's life was like as a highschooler as well as a 20 something-year-old. In a lot of ways, she has changed a lot. She doesn't like to let anyone in and is definitely wary of people. Everything is perfectly controlled and perfectly measured and she's obsessed with making sure she never sets of foot out of bounds. Ani is not the most reliable narrator, which I liked.

I think that the most fascinating thing about this book is how the story was told. The author gives you just enough to want to continue to read the story just to figure out what happened to Ani and why she is the way that she is. This is a good debut and I am looking forward to more by this author!