Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll

 Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll
Published by Simon & Schuster ISBN 9781476789637
Hardcover, $25, 338 pages

The one blurb that publishers want on their novel is "Better than Gone Girl!", which is getting a little ubiquitous lately. I'm not a big suspense fan, and Gone Girl wasn't my favorite book, but I have read other books compared to it, like The Girl On The Train.

Jessica Knoll's suspenseful novel Luckiest Girl Alive even has 'girl' in the title. It begins with Ani FaNelli shopping for items to put on her bridal registry. She picks up a Wustof knife and wonders how it would feel if she slid into her fiance's stomach.

Something is off about Ani. She has a fabulous job at a woman's magazine (think Cosmo), and is engaged to a great catch, a man with a great job and who is socially connected. But there is something in Ani's past, something that happened when she was in high school.

Ani grew up on the wrong side of the tracks outside Philadelphia. Her mother wanted Ani to meet the right people and so sent her daughter to Bradley, a private high school for blue bloods. Ani didn't fit in at first, she sat at the misfits' table at lunch.

Until one day, she caught the eye of one of the popular guys at school. Soon she was eating lunch with the cool kids and even attending their parties where, of course, everyone was drinking.

Something bad happened at Bradley, and the reader is not told what. A documentary crew wants to interview Ani about the incident, but Ani's fiance doesn't want her to do the interview. What exactly happened?

The reader is given clues, but when we finally find out what happened, about halfway through the book, the story really takes off. I have to admit that up until that revelation, I was not really taken with the story. But once we get to the incident, Knoll's writing is so tight and tense, I felt like I didn't take a breath for the entire chapter.

I have to admit, I guessed wrong as to what really happened, and so the surprise was shocking, even though as we got closer to the reveal, there are clues given if you want to pick them up.

Knoll's characters are well developed, and anyone who went to high school (which is most of us) felt many of the things Ani did- isolated, fearful of not fitting in, and hoping to make friends. Knoll taps into those feelings so well.

Ani has problems, and in the early chapters when she talks about her sexual desires, I admit to thinking that maybe this book just isn't for me. But I'm glad I continued on, because I was rewarded with a nail-biting story. Ani has to look inside herself to discover who she really wants to be, and her journey to get there is fascinating.

I liked Luckiest Girl Alive better than Gone Girl and better than The Girl On The Train, because Jessica Knoll does a great job of creating suspense and empathy for a troubled character. And even after reading it awhile ago, just thinking about now it is giving me heart palpitations and a dry mouth.

Summer Reads 2015

Reprinted from auburnpub.com

Summer is right around the corner (isn’t it?), and that means it’s time to search out books for the beach, lake, pool deck, summer cottage or back porch. Click on the title below each book to get more information.

First up, there are the so-called beach reads. The Fifty Shades of Grey fans may have to wait for the next installment Grey, but in the meantime they may want to check out the latest chapter in Jackie Collins’ ‘Lucky’ series, titled The Santangelos. Once again she blends a cocktail of sex, violence, and general mayhem amongst Lucky and her extended family. It’s a real page-turner, and there are graphic sex scenes, so fair warning. 

The Santangelos

Dorothea Benton Frank returns to the Lowcountry of South Carolina for her summer novel, All The Single Ladies, the story of a nurse caring for a patient who becomes good friends with her patient’s best friends. There’s lots of female bonding here, and this is aimed at women who have lived life, and have to deal with adult children, and mothers and grandmothers too. 

All The Single Ladies

Shelley Noble’s novel has an actual beach setting. In her novel Whisper Beach, Vanessa left her home there at age seventeen when she became pregnant. Fifteen years later, she returns home for a funeral, and ends up staying for awhile to help a old friend with her failing restaurant. This one is also about friendship, lost love and coming home. 

Whisper Beach

If fast-paced thrillers are more your style, Jessica Knoll’s novel Luckiest Girl Alive has been favorably compared to Gone Girl. Ani FaNelli has a glamorous job, a handsome, wealthy fiance, and the world on a string. But a secret from her past has threatened to derail all that she has worked for. Critics have been praising this debut novel from Knoll, a Hobart and William Smith Colleges graduate. 

Luckiest Girl Alive

Author Charles Dubow's followup to his novel Indiscretion is Girl In The Moonlight, about Wylie, a young man who has been enchanted by Cesca, a wild, spirited, beautiful young woman. Cesura toys with Wylie over the years, destroying him in the process for any other woman. Their passionate relationship over the years takes the reader from the East Hamptons to the Upper East Side of Manhattan to Paris and Barcelona. 

Girl In The Moonlight

Judy Blume, best known for her iconic children’s books like Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret? and Forever, has written an adult novel this year, In The Unlikely Event. Taking place in Elizabeth, New Jersey, it tells the story of Miri, who returns to her hometown thirty-five years after a series of plane crashes occurred there (which actually happened). We see how all these years later, people in the town are still haunted by the plane crashes, and Blume brings to vivid life the feelings of growing up in that place at that time in history. 

In The Unlikely Event

If you prefer to read non-fiction, Los Angeles Times reporter Jill Leovy’s Ghettoside- A True Story of Murder in America takes a look at murder in Los Angeles. Los Angeles has almost one murder every day, and many of them go unsolved because no one seems to care about the victims. 

Ghettoside

Leovy writes about the case of Bryant Tennelle, a young black man who was murdered and doomed to be an unsolved and forgotten homicide until detective John Skaggs caught the case. Skaggs doggedly pursued justice for Tennelle, and by telling this story Levy shares how the epidemic of young black men killing each other exists and how it could be stopped. 

Joseph J. Ellis, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his book Founding Brothers, returns with The Quartet- Orchestrating The Second American Revolution, 1783-1789 about the four men- George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison- who, after the American Revolution, worked to draft the Bill of Rights and ensure that the states would accept the powers of the federal government in order to create a strong national union. 

The Quartet

Actress Kate Mulgrew has been working on TV for over thirty years, best known as Mary Ryan on the ABC soap Ryan’s Hope, as the first female captain of a Starfleet vessel on Star Trek-Voyager and can currently be seen as tough prison inmate Red on Orange Is The New Black, and she recounts her life’s story in the brilliantly written memoir Born With Teeth. It’s honest and fascinating, but fans looking for gossip will be disappointed. 

Born With Teeth

Whatever you read this summer, I hope you enjoy it.