Luckiest Girl Alive

The problem with advertisers, is that they make these sweeping comparisons to other books that give you an unrealistic expectation of the book at hand. The Luckiest Girl Alive suffers from being compared to Gone Girl. There are very few authors, in my opinion, who can write a morally ambiguous woman quite as good as Gillian Flynn. That's not to say that the Luckiest Girl Alive wasn't a good book, because it was in several ways. I think what was done great here was the individual story arc that Tiffany went through and the meandering, disjointed way it took for her to get there. I thought that was realistic in its portrayal because she was seriously messed up, rightly so. I think the portrayal of her fiancé was done well. He wasn't a bad person per se, he was someone who was duped by the image that image that Tiffany had cultivated for herself and became victim to her discovering that the image she had made was not sufficient. Living a lie no longer was benefitting for her.

The reason I think this book fails is because I have a degree in psychology, so I can read between the lines to understand what the bigger picture of all of this might look like. I get the subtle nuances of the trauma she had suffered and the ripples it would obviously make in her current life. But for the uninformed reader, that aspect is woefully absent so instead the reader gets this picture of someone who has all these deficiencies with none of the background story to understand why these deficiencies should make you hurt for her and root for her. Gone Girl never had that problem because those characters were never meant to be liked, but Tiffany needs to be a likable character in order for this story to be redeemable otherwise she's just some broken thing who takes out her brokenness on other people.

But I do like this book and I do think people should give it a chance outside of what they might expect from the likes of Gillian Flynn.