Luckiest Girl Alive

March 30, 2015
One woman’s carefully orchestrated, perfect life slowly cracks to reveal a dark underbelly in Knoll’s knockout debut novel. Ani FaNelli has left her Main Line suburban Philadelphia roots behind to reinvent herself as a writer for a successful New York magazine. She is now engaged to the successful, wealthy Luke. But her past threatens to come back to haunt her, in the form of a documentary about a school shooting that happened at her prestigious private high school years ago. Ani leaves New York to travel back to suburban Philadelphia to tell her side of the story. Knoll carefully unravels Ani’s past, her fractured relationship with her mother, and her suffering at the hands of her fellow high school students. Flashbacks reveal the psychological and physical damage inflicted by Ani’s classmates, the effects of which linger in the present. And a chance encounter with Ani’s former teacher, Andrew Larson, reminds Ani of her decision to participate in the documentary and opens up a host of questions she wants to ask him about his participation in it. Yet what sets this novel apart is the author’s ability to snare the reader from page one, setting the tone for a completely enthralling read as the secrets are revealed. Agent: Alyssa Reuben, Paradigm Agency.

March 1, 2015
Knoll's debut thriller is a dark, cynical psychological comment on our culture of excess and violence.TifAni FaNelli seems to have it all: an upcoming marriage to a handsome, wealthy financier; a job at a competitive, sexy women's magazine; and a wardrobe filled with designer names. But buried beneath this surface is a secret past that threatens every day to destroy her success and happiness. As her marriage nears, and she finds herself under even more stress about keeping up appearances, Ani forces herself to participate in a documentary commemorating a violent incident from her high school days, hoping that she might, once and for all, be able to make peace with the past. Knoll's novel is fragmented and unsure of what tone to take; the first part of the story seems at once superficial but also satirical in its complete obsession with designer name-dropping and diet-worshipping. When Knoll alternates chapters about Ani's present with flashback chapters, the narrative becomes less commentary and more very depressing movie-of-the-week. The main problem is that Ani, despite the awful things she survives, is not a particularly admirable or interesting character, and she doesn't have the charisma to bring any light to the savage story that unfolds. Even the final suggestion that she will finally break away from trying to be perfect and instead be true to herself lacks punch. The promise of redemption in the end is not enough to balance the darkness.

April 15, 2015
Knoll's novel jumps decades, flashing back to TifAni FaNelli's traumatic adolescence as she plans to meet a group of documentarians who want to know what really happened at Bradley High School. As a teenager, Ani had been raped by multiple boys at a party, then she was caught up in a Columbine-esque disaster at her high school, and assumed to have been an accomplice in the shooting since she had been friends with one of the gunmen, and he targeted the students who attacked her. Ani reexperiences guilt and anger at not having come forth to report the rapes, though her older and wiser self realizes it was out of desperation to fit in with Bradley's popular, wealthy students. These are demons she is still fighting as she prepares to marry her fiance, Luke, in the hope that, as she freely admits, the influence of his wholesome upbringing will help her in her effort to redeem her past life. The plot is slow to unfold, but Ani's predicament is compelling. A powerful depiction of the psychological trauma of rapeexcellent for book discussions.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)