Luckiest Girl Alive - Jessica Knoll

pages: 352   published: 2015

Ani strives really hard to have a perfect life. She has lived through a trauma in her past, that has marked her for life in everyone's eyes. And yet, despite this trauma being widely public and known, it seems that there is still some truth behind this trauma that everyone is not aware of, and that Ani has kept desperately hidden for all these years.

I had a hard time getting into the book at first, because I couldn't relate to Ani. She was so fake. I wasn't sure I would finish the book. But little by little, as we get to know her background story, I started understanding where her fakeness was coming from. I still don't relate to it, because it wouldn't be my kind of protection mechanism, but I can understand that this would be some people's way. I therefore started to appreciate the book more when I was about halfway through it. However, I was disappointed by the ending. 

***SPOILER ALERT*** If you want to read this book, don't read the rest of the review ***SPOILER ALERT*** 

I found that things turned around too quickly in Ani's life at the end. As if the filming of the documentary was the therapy she had always needed and that completing the documentary was all she needed to turn her life around. It seemed to me that Ani was so far gone into her fakeness and need to impress others, that the documentary should not have been sufficient to pull her out of her self-harming spiral.