A sixteen year old girl living at an all-girls boarding school in the late sixties keeps a diary. Her poet father had committed suicide, her remorseful mother is wrapped up in her own pain, and the refuge school should have been vanishes. Best friend Lucy and the author have adjoining rooms, but their routine and friendship and disrupted when a newcomer, Jewish like the protagonist, but mysteriously able to get away with behaviour she never could, arrives. Ernessa disrupts not only her intimate friendship with best friend Lucy but manages to turn all her friends against her.
Influenced by a supernatural literature class run by sexy male poet/teacher Mr Davies, our nameless narrator becomes convinced that Ernessa is a vampire feeding off Lucy, who gets sicker and sicker as the story continues. Is Ernessa really a creature of the night, or is our narrator, influenced by the drugs rife through the school and beset by grief for her father, delusional or psychotic?
Written in the style of traditional nineteenth century Gothic novels, The Moth Diaries has a fascinating premise, and the diary reads believable like that of an adolescent girl, but I found the way it was written frustrating and unengaging. None of the characters, including the protagonist, were particularly interesting, and the suspense that could have been engendered by the plot is undone by the disclosure at the very beginning - the diary is being read by its' author thirty years later, and was given back to her by the psychiatrist who cared for her when she had that one and only psychotic break at the end of her sixteenth year.
Lynn is the lover of all things Gothic, and has a better appreciation of nuance than I (the themes of The Shipping News' chapters was reflected in the descriptions of the knots opening each section?) and could no doubt get more from the subtleties of the plot. For me, though? Eh. - Alex
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