The Moth Diaries Review

The Moth Diaries
Rachel Klein
Price: AUD $17.99(NZ$21.99)
ISBN: 9780571259489
Format: Paperback - B format
Publisher: FABER
Imprint: FABER CHILDREN PB
Number of pages: 256
Publication Date: July 2010

'Ernessa is a vampire. She wants me, and only me, to see it.'
At an exclusive girls' boarding school, a sixteen-year-old girl records her most intimate thoughts in a diary. The object of her obsession is her room-mate, Lucy Blake, and Lucy's friendship with their new and disturbing classmate. An absorbing, gothic psychological thriller.

Description

Ernessa is a mysterious presence with pale skin and hypnotic eyes. Around her swirl dark secrets and a series of ominous disasters. As fear spreads through her exclusive boarding school, fantasy and reality mingle into a waking nightmare of gothic menace, fuelled by the lusts and fears of adolescence.

And at the centre of it all is the question: Is Ernessa really a vampire? Or is the narrator trapped in her own fevered imagination?
About Rachel Klein

Rachel Klein received her BA and MA degrees in English Literature from the University of Michigan, where she received Hopwood Awards for both translation and short story. Her work has been published in the Chicago Review and the Literary Review. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Review

The Moth Diaries is a first person diary styled novel about the coming of age of a teenage girl living in an all girls boarding school. Add the element of vampire, and you have the basis for some unusual conflicted emotions and feelings to deal with on top of living away from your family.

The story is set in a girls boarding school with the usual conflict present in many current teen vampire stories. While there are some subtleties and richness in the characters, the format of the novel distances the reader from the main character somewhat.

At only 256 pages, there isn’t much time to fully develop the characters, and combined with the distance set by the diary entries, it is a bit hard to fully relate to the characters and appreciate the subtle sub-plots.