Ratings11
Average rating3.6
"In a riveting debut novel that reads like Prep meets Gone Girl, a young woman is determined to create the perfect life--husband, home, and career--until a violent incident from her past threatens to unravel everything and expose her most shocking secret of all. Twenty-eight-year-old New Yorker Ani FaNelli seems to have it all: she's a rising star at The Women's Magazine, impossibly fit, perfectly groomed, and about to marry Luke Harrison, a handsome blueblood. But behind that veneer of perfection lies a vulnerability that Ani holds close and buries deep--a very violent and public trauma from her past that has left her constantly trying to reinvent herself. And only she knows how far she would go to keep her secrets safe. When a documentary producer invites Ani to tell her side of the chilling incident that took place when she was a teenager at the prestigious Bradley School, she hopes it will be an opportunity for public vindication. Armed with the trappings of success--expensive clothes, high-powered byline, a massive engagement ring--she is determined to silence the whispers of suspicion and blame from her past, and prove once and for all how far she's come since Bradley. She'll even let them film her lavish wedding on Nantucket, the final step in her transformation. But perfection doesn't come without cost. As the wedding and filming converge, Ani's meticulously crafted facade begins to buckle and crack--until an explosive revelation offers her a final chance at redemption, even as it rocks her picture-perfect world. Equal parts glitz and darkness, and with a singular voice and twisting plot, Luckiest Girl Alive reads like Sex & the City--if Carrie Bradshaw had a closet full of skeletons instead of shoes. In Ani FaNelli, Jessica Knoll has created a complex and vulnerable heroine who you'll be rooting for to the very last page"--
Reviews with the most likes.
Ani is initially very hard to like. She's brittle, mean, a snob, and social climbing. She never becomes completely likable, but who is? We need to stop demanding that. Over the course of the novel, we read about some of how she became this brittle woman. The ways she was hurt, let down, traumatized, betrayed, misunderstood, and abandoned molded much of who she became, and made her story compelling. We're still letting down girls and women in many of the same ways.
When I mentioned in a book group I was reading it, someone pretty much responded “That second half!” The second half is the fulfillment of the slow burn first half, it's true.
After the novel, the author included an essay on what she has in common with Ani. If this is in your copy, please read it! In it, she writes: I know that I made the mistake of thinking that living well is the best revenge. That I figured out, eventually, that the appearance of living well is not the same thing as actually living well.
I think a lot of people make the same mistake, and this is what makes Ani (and the author) so relatable – the way she strive in the wrong ways to heal festering wounds. Ani sometimes drinks a lot of water, and is fixated in food, because she starves and thirsts to get her basic needs met. She thinks if she acquires enough outward success that she can show the people who've harmed her, can show herself, that she is worthy – and even more importantly, that she is safe.
While I really kinda hated the New York engagement modern day stuff, I loved the material with young TiFani, and that made the book worth reading. (That name, though?)
I really am not sure where to start with my review. Everything I have read compares this to Gone girl. Yes it goes back and forth between chapters but thats where the comparisons stop.
Twenty-eight-year-old narrator Ani FaNelli is living what she thinks is the perfect life - “cool job, impressive zip code, hungry body, and the kicker - dreamboat fiancé.” But from the first page, when she imagines plunging a steel blade into husband-to-be Luke Harrison, it's clear that whatever she exhibits to the world around her, something inside Ani is dark and broken and desperate. Because something happened to Ani when she was a freshman at Bradley, an exclusive Philadelphia prep school. Back then she was TifAni FaNelli, from the suburbs, with dreams of fitting in with the old-moneyed crowd at Bradley.
Ultimately, LUCKIEST GIRL ALIVE is about how hard it is to know ourselves in a world that's all about appearances and one-upping each other. Ani is convinced that a lot of money, an impressive job, and a blue blood fiancé are the things she needs to protect her from the horrors of the world.
fuck you dean
im only 1 minute into the film and i know it's going to be bad thanks reese witherspoon