Book Review: Luckiest Girl Alive

Stopping a book a quarter of the way through to google what the premise is is not a good start to any novel; however, that is exactly what happened while I was reading Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll. I could not quite figure out why I purchased the novel nor what it was exactly about. Not a good thing.

image from Goodreads.com

Throughout the first half of the novel, I kept thinking to myself, why am I reading this? Ani, the main character of the novel, is a self-indulged, miserable woman who is engaged to a perfect, wealthy man whom she does not love, and when she looks back on her past, there is nothing good there either. Ani, formerly TifAni, is all about appearances and details. She spends the majority of her time working to ensure that no one sees what a phony she is who actually had to fight her way to fit in to the role of New York Woman's Magazine writer and overcome some terrible things from her teenaged years.

While I did not hate the novel, I did not truly like it either. I disliked Ani's character. She was snobby, conceited, and shallow...things she grew into after enduring a horrible tragedy in her teenaged years. What I did not quite understand was how she could become such a nasty person after witnessing what the nastiness of others caused in high school. One would think that she would try to better herself and not become like the kids who bullied her and many others during those formidable years which led to so much tragedy. 

Overall, I give Luckiest Girl Alive a 6 out of 10, with its only redeeming factor being that it does pick up towards the end. This is the second novel I have purchased that was touted as the next Gone Girl and both have fallen incredibly short of that label. At this point, I think that the only novel that can honestly be the next Gone Girl is one written by Gillian Flynn.