Customer Reviews

The Moth Diaries

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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."

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.

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.

Definitely an eerie book. I loved the strange touches that made you go back to see if you just read what you thought you'd read... Such as trying to waken the friend and noticing that the friend has a rose branch clamped between her legs; and the memory of her father reading fairy tales to her sounded cute at first till she describes how the fairy tales were gruesome and frightening and that he would laugh and continue reading them even when she begged him to stop. And was the encounter with the poetry teacher real or a hallucination? And whatever happened to her mother's art work that was supposed to channel her grief? I was disappointed that it was never described.

I think the description on the back of the book gave too much away! I would like to have approached the book as a straight-forward vampire story and then come to the realization on my own that there might be other levels. But the description, unfortunately, prepares you in advance for that.

So... Vampire or psychotic teenager? I'm tempted to think psychotic teenager, except that the psychiatrist confirms that this type of `episode' never happened to her again. No Ernessa, no `psychosis.' I suppose you're not supposed to be completely sure. One thing I thought would have been a wild touch - If, when she's looking at pictures of the class reunion that she skipped, she'd seen Dora and Lucy in the crowd.

The Moth Diaries may be Rachel Kleins first novel, but one would never know it by reading it. The tale of a young girl, struggling with her inner demons at a New England boarding school is a master piece, a real look into the soul of a teen girl. This book is a "must-read" for any teenage girl, or anyone who was.

At some point, a character in Rachel Klein's engaging "The Moth Diaries" says that she had discovered that life isn't meaningless. She claims that `[t]here's so much beauty around us. It is up to us to discover and to give purpose to our lives'. This sort of comment can also be applied to the novel itself. This is not a very famous book, nevertheless extremely well written that deserved to be more read.

The main character in "The Moth Diaries" is a sixteen-year-old girl who records in her diary her experience at an exclusive girls' boarding school. She has just been sent to the institution because her father committed suicide and her mother can't cope with grief and giving her daughter attention. In the place she is an alien because she has no friends until she meets her roommate, Lucy Blake.

The girls become close friends until some months later when a new girl named Ernessa arrives at the school. This new student is different from the others and in no time becomes friends of Lucy's to the narrator disbelief. Day after day the novel's hero loses a bit more of her friendship and becomes desperate. Until when she `finds' out that the new girl is a vampire and is searching for new victims among the girls.

Klein's work blurs the line between paranoia and reality and fantasy. The narrator is under pressure, and has been through a traumatic situation, therefore her opinions are biased and one can never trust her completely. This is one of the main qualities of the novel. The story is developed in a landscape of dreams and suppositions. The reader dives into this new world where nothing is totally real.

The writing is sensuous and dreamy -- something that reminds of Jeffrey Eugenides's "The Virgin Suicides". The characters are very real -- despite the fact that one of the `is' a vampire. Klein is not interested in making assumptions; she wants to paint a state of madness with her words. And so she does. But her writing is subtle, and her prose so seductive that it is virtually impossible no to believe that Ernessa is a real vampire.

I have been waiting a long time for a book like this, one that would take the vampire legend seriously and write it from the inside, so to speak. This book, which reminds me so much of a great film by Roger Vadium called "Blood and Roses," is a true successor to Bram Stoker's classic. Lots of people have tried, of course, and some have been pretty interesting (Whitley Strieber's "The Hunger" is a good example), but in the end they are just empty genre exercises. Nothing is at stake. In this book, with its quiet and beautiful language, everything is on the line all the time and you really can lose your soul. Vampirism is a condition of existence, and another name for it is despair -- a despair so pervasive it seeps into every corner of reality. It's an invitation to a place elsehwere, to a new body and an unburdened spirit, and Rachel Klein makes the despair so palpable that it has to take physical form. Ernessa has to exist. Everyone in the book is under the same spell. Nothing is stable. Bodies, states of mind, family relationships are all changing. Even the school is beginning to disintegrate into chaos. And the least stable thing of all is the act of writing, where you transform feelings into words, events into stories, and stories into myths. Writing won't take the narrator all the way over to another reality, but it can lead her to the one act that will: suicide. (Query: what was the PW reviewer smoking that blinded him/her to the fact that this book isn't about teen delusions and insanity but is really about trying to stay sane when you take everything around you and inside you seriously?) The powerful thing about this novel is that the narrator is the same decades after she writes the journal. The razor blade is still there, hidden in the pages of the journal where she wrote her deepest thoughts, in case she wants to find out if there is a place where she can live forever.

This novel is clearly inspired by the novel Lake of Dead Languages by another writer (don't recall her name right now). It's a cleverly built up story, actually much more interesting than the Dead Lake novel it appearenty is inspired by. A girl, clever and somehow distraught, writes a diary, which from the start is a little childish or naive but in the end desperate and serious. The novel describes the girls lives at the school, but as much the main character's inner life. It's a clever and beautiful novel.

I honestly don't know what to think of this book. I like it but there were so many questions given and popped out in my head that I don't know the main trail anymore. I'm not sure if it is supposed to create that effect. Maybe I should read it once more or perhaps I just leave it like that. There were so many provoking, beautiful and haunting lines and thoughts inside.

Although it created a hazy purpose(s), I found myself thinking about it, wanting to continue reading it. The narrator seemed a very thoughtful girl and I think she became more paranoid the more she thought about Ernessa. She was shaken because of her father in the first place, but not crazy. Her way of thinking of everything was just different, more faceted than any other girls.

And Ernessa... I can't say she didn't have anything to do with the whole situation. Especially with the narrator's 'illusion'. The denials of her mother, teacher and friends were the main cause of her paranoid. The deaths were real but no one knew how they happened. It was kind of reflection how we deny something just because we don't want to see, can't see for ourselves. What was left is like a matter of faith and imagination: Do you believe in what the narrator told you or you'll just ignore it like the rest of the 'normal' society....

I gave this book 3 stars because it is well written; I can't deny that. However, I was ultimately so frustrated with the ambiguity of the book, along with the sometimes slow pace, that I was tempted to give it 2 stars. I genuinely wish I had stopped reading long before the end, so that I could have spent time reading something I might have enjoyed more.

The book is written in the form of a teenager's diary. The author does a great job of capturing the character at that age. However, this also means reading about every single petty frustration the narrator has, just as you would have to if you were reading your teenage daughter's diary.

Overall, I can't quite recommend this book, except perhaps for those who are just dying to read a teenager's diary that has a lot of ambiguity in it.