Luckiest Girl Alive - Review

3/5 stars

I finished this book written by Jessica Knoll last night and I'm still thinking about it. I chose to read it because I liked the irony of the title: the main character, the "Luckiest girl alive" is presented in the synopsis as someone who has everything, but then "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". What??? I'm in. Now? Well, I cannot say I liked this book per se, because of some of the issues it presents (rapes and killings cannot be liked), but it kept me hooked until the end, I wanted to understand it.

The protagonist is not someone I found likeable as a person, from the beginning you can sense there is something she is keeping well hidden under the surface. Thanks to the structure of the story that alternates Ani's current life and herder as a freshman at Bradley's, we know her as TifAni FaNelli, Tif, Finny, and Ani Harrison, different ways to address her that marks the changes in her life, how she has reinvented herself several times. She definitely has something going on, as we can understand also from her relationship with her blue blood fiancé.

Luke seems to love her, but from the start we can see that he doesn't really want to know everything about her, and then we understand he doesn't love her as a whole, but just a version, the one that better fits into his idea of a wife. Also, Ani herself says the word “fiancé” does not “bother me so much as the one that came after it. Husband. That word laced the corset tighter, crushing organs, sending panic into my throat with the bright beat of a distress signal.” And don't get me started with the paragraph in which she imagines to cut him with a knife. Wow. The perfect foundation for a healthy marriage. Maybe only the moment Ani (and we) realizes Luke did not even consider the multiple rapes she suffered as real violence is worse.

But the most intriguing breadcrumb given to the reader is the mystery of the Five, but we come to discover who they are and how they are related to Ani bit by bit, until we read of the shooting and everything that followed it. And then we can better understand what drives her, what pushes her to participate in the documentary, also to tell her side of the story.

Maybe everything is in those words Ani uses to describe herself almost at the beginning: "I’m no plucky heroine", combined with "I’d gone and messed up my story line" near the end. Or maybe is all in her acceptance of who she is.

"When a guy asks if he can take me out to dinner, I hope maybe he’s someone who can eventually love me exactly the way I am. Maybe he wouldn’t fear my bite, my kookiness, maybe he’d get past my thorny bristles to see there is sweetness here. Would understand that moving on doesn’t mean never talking about it, never crying about it."

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