The past won't stay buried.
Luckiest Girl Alive is a 2015 mystery novel written by the American author Jessica Knoll.
The novel follows 28-years-old Ani Fanelli, columnist for a glossy women's magazine who seems to have it all: glamorous job, designer clothing, jet-set friends and a fiance from an Old Money family. However, behind her seemingly perfect life a Dark and Troubled Past is still lurking.
Ani is actually Tiffani Fanelli, a working-class Italian-American who has attended the exclusive Bearsdley School in Philadelphia's Main Line on a scholarship, and has survived an horrific school shooting during her freshman year in high school.
An upcoming documentary about the shooting is forcing her to come to terms with her past ordeal, her secrets and also to question the life she has built for herself after those horrific events.
The novel was Knoll's first published work. In 2022, an adaptation starring Mila Kunis and Chiara Aurelia as adult and teenage Ani has aired on Netflix.
The novel contains the following tropes:
- Abusive Parents:
- Ani's mother is emotionally neglectful, obsessed with appearances.
- Olivia's father is mentioned to have been physically abusive.
- Academic Alpha Bitch: Bearsdley is a school who prides itself to pump the Ivy league's veins, nasty students like Dean and Hillary are also academically gifted.
- Adults Are Useless: Ani's mother is misguided or Vicariously Ambitious, teachers are apathetic or apply favoritism, and well-meaning adults like Mr. Larson are limited by the blatant favoritism the school applies to affluent students.
- Alpha Bitch: Olivia is the meanest of the girls at Bentley to Ani, haughtily calling her a “financial aid kid” to her face right off the bat and refusing to let her sit with their friends at lunch. Its unsurprising when Ani had to consciously make herself appear sad in the interview when describing Olivia’s death.
- And I Must Scream: Ani was internally screaming while being raped but was too drunk to say anything.
- Asshole Victim: Dean, Peyton and Liam, Ani's rapists are shot dead by Arthur. Dean survives as a paraplegic unable to have children.
- Attempted Rape: Dean tried to rape Ani again when she confronted him again at Olivia's house. She barely escapes him but she is not spared from getting a black eye.
- Bittersweet Ending: Ani has left Luke at their rehearsal evening, is heavily in debt for calling off the marriage, and has postponed her New York Times offer by accepting an editor job for a less important magazine but for a higher salary. However, she has broken up her unfulfilled relationship with Luke, has exposed Dean Barton for the rapist he was and is claiming a life truer to her real self.
- Breast Expansion: Inverted. The difference in body shapes between Chiara Aurelia and Mila Kunis as Teenage!Ani and Adult!Ani is handwaved by an offhand comment that she had breast reduction surgery in the intervening years.
- Career Versus Man: Ani is set for a promotion as editor and would follow her boss to the New York Times. However she is getting married to Luke, and he is also set for a promotion that would lead him to London. He expects her to leave her job and follow him to Europe.
- Chekhov's Gun:
- Arthur's father shotgun which Ani is shown serves as a murder weapon for the school shooting;
- The picture of Arthur and his father which Ani stole during their huge argument and has kept for all those years, until she accidentally lost it. Luke has thrown it out carelessly and used the cover to snort cocaine with his friends. Ani decides to leave him after this reveal.
- Cool Teacher: Mr. Larson, the advanced English teacher. He's loved for his fresh approach to literature and for being just a decade older than his students. Female students are also Eating the Eye Candy.
- Dark and Troubled Past: And how. Before hitting 16, Ani has survived a school shooting, a gang-rape and killing a former friend in self-defense.
- First-Person Smartass: The novel is written from Ani's first person narrator, whose internal commentary jumps from The Snark Knight to the Lemony Narrator.
- Foreshadowing:
- The book starts with Ani buying items for her future home and contemplates how she can stab Luke with a kitchen knife. Which is how she ultimately killed Arthur in her backstory.
- Ani can't find Arthur's photo despite having it well kept for all those years, and wonders with Luke where it can be. Luke is lying about not having a clue where it is; he has thrown it away.
- Former Friend of Alpha Bitch: Arthur and Dean used to be childhood best friends before Dean became popular and Arthur came out as gay.
- Green-Eyed Monster: Ani suffers constantly from envy to her more affluent peers, like Hilary and most of all Olivia (who is also dating her crush Liam). In the present, she is unbalanced by Mr. Larson’s gorgeous but seemingly vapid wife Whitney.
- Known Only by Their Nickname: Beth is mostly known as "The Shark" for the wide gap between her eyes. Ani has to make an effort to remember that Beth is her real name.
- Laser-Guided Karma:
- Dean survives being shot by Arthur but is made permanently paraplegic and unable to have sex, ironically so since he had previously raped Ani.
- Again, Dean has accused Ani for years of having helped plan the shooting. Ani registers his private confession to the rape and with the help of the documentary director outs him in the public eye.
- Meaningful Rename: Tiffani goes by Ani when we met her at age 28. She tells people she has changed it to avoid being associated with the school shooting, which is true, but mostly to shred off her lower-class background.
- Rape As Back Story: We find out that weeks before the school shooting, Ani was raped by Dean, Liam and Peyton at a party.
- The Reveal: Ani was gang-raped weeks before the shooting. Also she put a stop to the killing by stabbing Arthur.
- Teacher/Student Romance: In the present, Ani and Mr. Larson give in to their attraction and share a kiss. But Mr. Larson eventually decides to not cheat on his wife and steps back, to Ani's chagrin.
- White Anglo-Saxon Protestant: Luke, Nell, Dean and Arthur are the most prominent example. Old Money and, as Ani puts it, not a single vowel at the end of their last name. Ani seeks to be married to one so she can shed off her Italian-American family name.
- Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: Part of Ani's arc is realizing that the lengths she has went to shape herself after her rich peers, her glamorous career and her Prince Charming have given her no happines. She still has self-esteem issues, her trauma has not healed, is stuck in an increasingly unfulfilling relationship and finds her fiance and his social circle boring and shallow.
