Rachel Klein: The Moth Diaries

Hi

The Moth Diaries has 262 pages and I got it at the Boekenfestijn.

“At an exclusive girls' boarding school, a sixteen-year-old girl records her most intimate thoughts in a diary. The object of her obsession is her room-mate, Lucy Blake, and Lucy's friendship with their new and disturbing classmate. Ernessa is a mysterious presence with pale skin and hypnotic eyes. Around her swirl dark secrets and a series of ominous disasters. As fear spreads through the school, fantasy and reality mingle into a waking nightmare of gothic menace, fueled by the lusts and fears of adolescence.
And at the center of the diary is the question that haunts all who read it: Is Ernessa really a vampire? Or is the narrator trapped in her own fevered imagination?”

I didn’t enjoy this book all that much.

The novel is made up as if we’re reading a diary. And it really feels like a maze full of a teenager’s thoughts and wishes. But this specific teenager, our unnamed main character, is clearly delusional and a bit of a stalker.
She’s also funny, very smart, a bit morbid and never really likeable.
And as all the other girls in school she’s self-absorbed and doesn’t really care about her classmates (except for Lucy).
From the start it is clear that she really is an unreliable narrator. Our protagonist seems unpopular and without friends but her diary entries show us that she thinks otherwise. As the novel progresses, her diary entries become increasingly disturbing and delusional. Still, a part of us keeps thinking that it might be real. So what is the truth and what’s not? What is brought on by her loneliness, her need for contact with Lucy, her reading of vampire novels and her drug use?
Enessa clearly is a wildly attractive and interesting girl. She’s also tragic and very different from our main character and other girls in school. So maybe there is some truth in our main character’s thoughts.

But it is too much of a school novel for me. There’s too much drugs, sex, smoking and philosophy to be realistic and the characters are too young and too shallow.
Also, I thought the novel dragging and too slow to be able to keep my attention.

All in all, it is a very different vampire story from what I’ve read and if you’re into supernatural novels this might be something for you.
The novels’ focus lies more on eternal youth and what that really means than on the bloodlust.

Happy reading and I’ll see you tomorrow.
Helena