Luckiest Girl Alive

TifAni FaNelli may be the least likable heroine in all of current popular literature. She's abrasive, selfish to the point where you start to consider that maybe she's a sociopath, and she's that particular type of social climber that just makes your teeth hurt from clenching. She's greedy and hard and bitter and cynical. Above all else though, TifAni is heartbreaking and that redeems her just enough that you find yourself caring about what happens to her.

Luckiest Girl Alive sat on my to-read list for months before I finally broke down and read it. I'd heard so many things about this book - comparisons to Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl (although I personally think a more apt comparison would be with Flynn's Dark Places), to Megan Abbott's Dare Me and The End of Everything. I heard that I had to read it. I heard that I should avoid it like the plague. 

I hated TifAni FaNelli and her grasping, desperate ways but at the same time, I empathized with her. She's got awful parents (really the only thing you need to know about them is that they named her TifAni for Christ's sake - it only gets worse from there) and she's just so lost in the world. It's no wonder she got hard. People like TifAni either go depressingly soft or they become frighteningly hard. TifAni's a damned diamond. 

The first half of the book wasn't good. It just wasn't. It's almost cliche to say this, but it just tried too hard. I could feel author Jessica Knoll pushing at me through the page, trying her best to shock me, to make me uncomfortable. To make TifAni edgy for the sake of being edgy. 

But then, somewhere around the middle of the story it was almost as if she let go and just let the story take over. Once that happened everything shifted and the book became great. I suddenly understood all those comparisons I'd been hearing. 

It's hard to give much of a plot summary that you won't find already printed on the dust jacket of this book without giving any of the twists away so I won't bother with all that here. Suffice it to say that this book was good and fans of Gillian Flynn and Megan Abbott (and all the other dark and twisty authors that are becoming so popular these days) should definitely give this a chance.