Luckiest Girl Alive--by Jessica Knoll

Ani FaNelli has built her life like a fortress — glamorous job, designer clothes, a fiancé from the right family — and she guards it with the kind of cold precision that makes people nervous around her. But underneath the curated surface is a teenage girl who survived something terrible at a elite prep school, and as a documentary crew starts asking questions she'd rather leave buried, the walls she's spent years constructing begin to crack. This is a novel about the impossible pressure women face to appear fine, to be palatable, to smile through things they should be allowed to be furious about.

Knoll writes Ani with a voice so sharp it practically draws blood — sardonic, image-obsessed, brutally self-aware. The prose moves fast, but it's the structure that does the real work: the story cuts between Ani's present-day life and her teenage years at Bradley, and those two timelines pull against each other with increasing tension until they collide. What makes the book linger is how honestly it portrays the way trauma gets buried under ambition, and how a woman can seem to have everything while still be running from something she's never let herself name.