Author(s): Rachel Klein
Format: Hardback
No. of Pages: 256
Publisher: COUNTERPOINT
Language: English
Date Published: 2002-07-29
Dimensions: 147.3 x 217.4 x 23.6mm
Publication City/Country: Berkeley, United States
Edition: New
Illustrations:

To anyone who wonders whether it is possible to survive adolescence, this is as much as I can offer of reassurance. So begins Rachel Klein's dark and disturbing first novel. Told through the pages of a sixteen-year-old girl's journal, The Moth Diaries is an unsettling and provocative portrait of obsession and fear.In the hothouse atmosphere of an exclusive girls' boarding school during the late sixties, the upheavals of social revolution and the war in Vietnam might as well not be happening. Nothing exists outside the girls and the school where it is all too easy to confuse fantasy and reality; friendship and lust; dreaming and wakefulness. And just as easy for the unnamed narrator, isolated with her increasingly obsessive musings, to imagine that a schoolmate is slowly destroying her friend and roommate.In a voice as poignant as it is persuasive, Rachel Klein's young narrator compels us to believe. Ernessa is a vampire. She is the cause of Lucy's mysterious and wasting illness and of a number of other disasters at the school as well. It seems almost unthinkable that the narrator, fragile and unstable, could have constructed her own gothic nightmare. Thirty years later, rereading her journal, and with two daughters of her own, she is no more certain than we are.