The Moth Diaries [Paperback]

Rachel Klein (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 29, 2003

Lucy and Ernessa have become inseparable. Ernessa’s taken her over. She’s consuming her.

What I saw wasn’t real. And I know it wasn’t a dream.

Ernessa is a vampire.

At an exclusive girls’ boarding school, a sixteen-year-old girl records her most intimate thoughts in a diary. The object of her growing obsession is her roommate, Lucy Blake, and Lucy’s friendship with their new and disturbing classmate. Ernessa is an enigmatic, moody presence with pale skin and hypnotic eyes.

Around her swirl dark rumors, suspicions, and secrets as well as a series of ominous disasters. As fear spreads through the school and Lucy isn’t Lucy anymore, fantasy and reality mingle until what is true and what is dreamed bleed together into a waking nightmare that evokes with gothic menace the anxieties, 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 has the narrator trapped herself in the fevered world of her own imagining?

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The outcast/coming-of-age genre often seduces first-time authors and Klein is no exception. The bulk of the book consists of the diary entries of a mentally ill 16-year-old during her junior year at Brangwyn School, an exclusive girls' boarding school, in the late '60s. These are framed by the observations of the same woman, now 46 and healthy, as she looks back on her severely disturbed youth through the pages of her journal. Her father, a poet, committed suicide and her grief-stricken mother sent her away to school because she could not attend to her own pain and her child simultaneously. Her best friend is Lucy, a pale blonde girl who would rather follow than lead. But a new girl named Ernessa worms in on the girls' friendship, causing the narrator to grow increasingly obsessive about Lucy and eventually fearful for Lucy's life. To offset Lucy's wavering loyalty, the narrator turns to other girls for comfort, including rebellious Charley, philosophical Dora, lovelorn Claire and sensitive Sofia. Despite the political, social and wartime upheaval of the era, the school remains an island where these girls play out their own miniature dramas and rebellions: as the narrator puts it, "the rest of the world seems very far away." The diary form and the already self-conscious narrator's increasingly paranoid voice add to the feeling of claustrophobia. Aside from waning curiosity about what is real and what is a figment of the narrator's imagination, most readers will be left with little to hold on to.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* The unnamed narrator of Klein's first novel is a studious, thoughtful 16-year-old at an elite boarding school in the late '60s. Her closest friend is her sweet, friendly roommate, Lucy, who navigates the school's social system with ease. The arrival of quiet, mysterious Ernessa upsets the balance between the friends when Ernessa befriends and seemingly takes Lucy away from the narrator. The narrator, absorbed by the books and stories she is reading in her English class, begins to resent and loathe Ernessa. Thanks to reading LeFanu's vampire story "Carmilla" and other tales, and to Ernessa's odd behavior and Lucy's mysterious wasting illness, the narrator begins to suspect that Ernessa is a vampire. As Lucy's inexplicable illness becomes grave, and two mysterious deaths shock the school, she becomes ever more uneasy. How can she stop Ernessa? The diary format of Klein's story gives it immediacy, and a menacing atmosphere permeates it. Klein's fanciful heroine, driven by her jealousies and imagination, is a compelling informant on the complex relationships of girls in boarding schools and on the parallels between obsession and the apprehension of the supernatural. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Bantam (July 29, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553382187
• ISBN-13: 978-0553382181
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.6 x 8.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #105,227 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Engrossing Buffy precursor/Carmilla in the 60s, August 5, 2003

By 

Gwen A Orel (Millburn, New Jersey United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Moth Diaries (Paperback)

I know there is supposed to be ambiguity in this book, so that it's not "really" about a vampire but about a disturbed girl who imagines the new girl at boarding school is a vampire.

However... honestly, I think that's a bit of a joke on reviewers that the author perpetrated to keep the book from being dismissed as "mere" fantasy. Yes, the heroine has a tragic past (father killed herself). Yes, she is taking a course on supernatural fiction... and ultimately has a dangerous flirtation with her teacher. yes, the new girl steals her best friend's affections.

These are all red herrings-- and the reason nobody takes her seriously. It's like the old saying, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you."

This is a chilling book... and I can't imagine that the blonde best friend wasting away is named "Lucy" (did none of the reviewers even READ Dracula or Carmilla?) by accident. Real deaths happen, mysterious illnesses and other elusive things that have only one of two explanations: a "real" gothic vampire, or a psychotic narrator.

To me the story only makes sense with the former... and that the narrator herself, as a grown woman, decides it must have been the latter is part of the novel's tragedy.

This is a witty, sly, haunting modern version of Carmilla. Chilling and very sad... perhaps the saddest is how we blind ourselves to real danger and evil in the name of "normal."

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book will suck you in, August 2, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Moth Diaries (Hardcover)

There seems to be a rush among critics and reviewers to categorize Klein's book as a story either about female adolescence or vampires or perhaps some combination of the two. However, simply labeling The Moth Diaries as just another entry in the "outcast-coming-of-age genre" fails to do justice to the true subtlety and richness of what is amazingly merely Klein's first novel. While readers looking for a story about vampires or conflicted teen girls at boarding school will likely find what they seek in this book, those with broader, more developed literary tastes can certainly find more of substance "to hold on to."

Just beneath the obvious plot lines so artfully summarized by the reviewer from Publishers Weekly lies an intelligent examination of the limitations of human perspective. Klein's narrator writes, "At Brangwyn [her boarding school], it was different. Nothing existed outside ourselves and school. For us, the world of politics, social revolution, the war in Vietnam never happened." The insular nature of the school is just a symptom of the narcissism that consumes each of the girls in the school, and most importantly, that restricts us all. One of the sinister aspects of human life is that we can only experience it from one point of view, our own, and thus all of our thoughts and experiences are necessarily filtered through the lens of our own self-perception. So the impossible task becomes to judge our own perceptions impartially. Readers of The Moth Diaries are granted the power to witness the narrator's life as recorded in her journal, but with the unfair advantage of a distant perspective. We can quickly dismiss the narrator's obsession with Ernessa and Lucy as the tragic creation of a mentally ill young girl, but we must pause to consider if some detached reader would not pass similar judgement on us if he were to read the darkest secrets in our unpublished diaries. Perhaps the most touching moment in the book comes in the afterword when the narrator, now an adult cured of her illness but still unable to escape the plague of her singular perspective, marvels at her outwardly content daughters, "They've always been at home in the world." The narrator, still focused on her own sufferings, fails to realize that, while it may be true that not everyone imagines their social rivals to be vampires, no one ever feels completely at home in this world. It is hard to imagine something more relevant, or more worth holding on to, than a thoughtful book about the danger of being trapped inside one's narrow self-perception. This is particularly true at a time when every week scores of people are bombed or shot because two opposing groups of people fail to see the world from any perspective other than that of their own suffering

Certainly, there is more to Klein's book than meets the eye and far more than could be outlined in a brief review, but suffice to say that there is ample and real substance that will allow a diversity of readers to find what interests them.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Compelling story blurs line between fiction and truth, July 16, 2004

By 

MusicMom13 "Andrea" (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Moth Diaries (Paperback)

Written in journal form, I found myself totally immersed in this story of a 16 year old girl, so beset with unresolved grief over the death of her father that she cannot distinguish reality from fantasy. Likewise, the reader needs to periodically stop to think whether they are reading testimony or dream. For a first novel, this is a marvelous example of a writer finding a voice. Thank you for this trip inside the deteriorating mind of a depressed adolescent. Also thank you for the afterword reconciling today with yesterday.