WELCOME BOOK LOVERS
Thanks for stopping by. My name is Cyndi and each week, myself and my two best book friends forever Ann and Karen jointly blog together on Book Club Thursday (BCT). To learn all about BCT please click here
If you're a regular reader, you are going to see some fresh changes to each of our BCT blogs for 2017. We are very excited and hope you will participate in our events.
This week we have:
Easy theme week- each of us can read any book we want as long as the pub date is at least six months ago.
Last week I blogged about not finishing books, and asked if you ever go back to read a book that you once put down. I mentioned a book in particular that I didn't finish...at least not initially:
HER PERFECT LIFE IS A PERFECT LIE.
As a teenager at the prestigious Bradley School, Ani FaNelli endured a shocking, public humiliation that left her desperate to reinvent herself. Now, with a glamorous job, expensive wardrobe, and handsome blue blood fiancé, she’s this close to living the perfect life she’s worked so hard to achieve.
But Ani has a secret.
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.
With a singular voice and twists you won’t see coming, Luckiest Girl Alive explores the unbearable pressure that so many women feel to “have it all” and introduces a heroine whose sharp edges and cutthroat ambition have been protecting a scandalous truth, and a heart that's bigger than it first appears.
The question remains: will breaking her silence destroy all that she has worked for—or, will it at long last, set Ani free?
Published in hardcover in May of 2015, I was excited to get my hands on this book- there'd been some buzz around it and I couldn't wait to read it.
I have no clue why I set the book aside- I was about 50 odd pages into it. I kept meaning to go back to it but...
So I recently read another book that actually referenced Luckiest Girl Alive so I decided to find my copy and finally try again.
As a side note, the trade paperback edition indicates there is new material but what that actually is I don't know since I read the hardcover.
I'm going to include quite a few spoilers at the end of this review but I'll warn you beforehand.
In general I liked this book enough that I'll read Ms.Knoll's future book.
Ani (pronounced Ah-nee) is our first person POV narrator. For me, she wasn't very likable. EVER.
It's laughable in a way (but realistic in a sense) that she specifically calls another character, Hallsy a nasty cunt, when in fact Ani herself is one my opinion.
Did I hate to love her or love to hate her, that is the question.
In fact would Ani have turned out the way she was if what happened to her at Bradley had happened or was part of her always a mean girl at heart?
SPOILER TIME
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OK -
I was disappointed in certain aspects of this novel. Perhaps I missed something, or misunderstood plot points but here we go:
When Ani is in high school (Bradley) she goes to a party. She's the only female there, gets drunk and sexually assaulted by the males there.
Horrible thing, and she certainly doesn't deserve that - she definitely has recall of it and has normal emotions and issues that one would expect...HOWEVER she then goes to another party soon after putting herself in another similar situation with the same male students! Really!!!!!!
Also Ani confides in a male teacher (actually not one much older than she is, who has his own role to play in the novel) and begs him not to tell anyone AND HE DOESN'T!
Ani also goes to Planned Parenthood and asks the doctor that sees her some questions about whether or not it was really rape and the doctor basically tells her she doesn't know - REALLY????????????????
Lastly, I would have liked the book more if Ani had actually really and truly been part of Ben and Arthur's plan and if that would have been the huge twist/reveal at the end.
August 17th : Cover Talk
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