Alysson’s Weblog

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.

Originalmente publicado em www.Amazon.com em 20/11/05