flynn fraud

If you know my love of books, you know that Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl is my all-time favorite book. Hands down. It's twisted, brilliant, and snarky all at once. So when I hear a new book is the next GG and I see that the film rights have been picked up by Reese Witherspoon's production company, I'm on board. Jessica Knoll was being hailed as a new Gillian Flynn in her debut novel Luckiest Girl Alive. So to the library website I went to place a hold on the book and begin my wait. And wait. And wait. Seriously, I waited for over a month for this one, all the while hearing that it's just fantastic. You should also know that our county library system isn't the largest, and even the most popular books are often only purchased in trios. You should also know I'm not the most patient individual in the world, so when my email finally arrived, I dashed to the library elated to get my hands on it. I was a little sad that my librarian didn't strike up a conversation about it, but I wasn't too sad to take this amazing selfie with the book when I got in the car.

Seriously, y'all. This is my life!

I finished up the book I was reading and skipped the others on my list to dive into this find. 

LGA finds Ani FaNelli-soon-to-be-Harrison (formerly TifAni. Seriously what kind of name is that? Shame on you Mrs. FaNellli!) living what appears to be the dream life as an editor for a Cosmo-esque (sidebar: the author truly is an editor at Cosmo...just sayin') magazine in Manhattan, only weeks away from her dream wedding to a wealthy man who will make all of her dreams come true. All the while, Ani keeps alluding to "the event" from high school that haunted her in her freshman year at a prestigious prep-school on the other side of the tracks from her Philadelphia suburb home. We get snippets here and there through alternating chapters of present-day and 2001. It turns out, she wasn't the good girl everyone thought she was, and several young men took advantage of her after a night of hard partying. When we return to present-day, she keeps referencing a documentary that she and her then-cross country coach are going to be participating in about "the event," which in all honesty I thought was the rape. I won't give away what the event was, but it changed her life and the community's forever. She finds herself on the wrong end of things and no one trusts her - even her parents. Essentially, New York and her rich man were what she was looking for to erase the pain of the past; her new take on her dreadful name is just the first step in her escape from Philly. 

Things happen during the documentary, and she is essentially allowed to make amends with her past and one of the main perpetrators against her. When she returns home just before her Nantucket wedding, some things have changed. I won't go into detail, but for me the entire last chapter ruined the book. The ending was total rubbish. Not a twist that I didn't see coming, but just a horrible ending to an otherwise decent tale. I loved the way that Ani told her story - first-person, heartbreakingly real, and full of deadpan wit. I can't count the number of times I read a paragraph aloud to my wife (check out her blog here) because the inner dialogue was just that funny. One of my favorite twisted lines was "I lost my virginity to someone who never saw my breasts." Such a weird yet poignant line. I love a female protagonist who is witty, authoritative, and cutting (use your own language here, but I won't say that word). You know the kind who can cut you the meanest dig in the book without your even realizing it; those are my kinds of heroines. Knoll delivered on that front. Her writing style was en pointe; I wish her plot had been as well.

2.5 (of 4) dusty book jackets.