A mesmerizing tale of emotional suspense where the only certainty is uncertainty; where reality for a young girl becomes a dangerous act of invention. "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 page 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, political activism, social revolution, and the war in Vietnam might never have happened. Nothing existed outside the girls and the school where it was 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 was slowly destroying her friend and roommate. But what was the truth? That Ernessa was a vampire responsible not only for Lucy's mysterious and wasting illness but for a series of other disasters at the school as well?
Or that the narrator, fragile and unstable, had intricately constructed her own gothic nightmare? Thirty years later, rereading her journal, she is no more certain than we are. Brilliantly conceived and compellingly readable, The Moth Diaries will haunt readers long after they've turned the final page.