"She didn't have anything in her teeth." 
 I took my time leaning over the table, slurped my wine from the rim to spare my white jeans. Never fuck with a rich white bitch and her white jeans. "Not in her teeth. Up her ass, on the other hand . . ." 
 Luke's laugh was the standing ovation. He shook his head, impressed. "You can be pretty vicious, you know?" 
 This book was sold with a blurb as being "for fans of Gone Girl." With all due respect, there is no comparison. It is more The Devil Meets Prada or Four Blondes than anything else. At best, it is the poor man's Gone Girl, a fake $5 knockoff of the original. 
 There is no arguing who is the superior writer. Flynn's words have more power. Knoll's words feel emotionless. Paraphrased. Here is a comparison of two paragraphs. 
 First, Flynn: 
 "Men always say that as the defining compliment, don't they? She's a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she's hosting the world's biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. 
 Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they're fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men - friends, coworkers, strangers - giddy over these awful pretender women, and I'd want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who'd like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I'd want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn't really love chili dogs that much - no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They're not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they're pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. 
 Now, Knoll: 
 Pretty girls had to appear as though they weren't trying to be pretty, which I had made the fatal mistake of doing at Bradley. There were times Nell went out in her father's polo, nasty old Uggs, and sweatpants, no makeup, just to prove her loyalty resided with her own gender. Pretty girls also had to have a self-deprecating sense of humor and point out when they had a blistering pimple and talk about their explosive diarrhea to assure other girls that they weren't interested in the role of man-eating minx. 
 As you can see, there is no comparison as to whose words are far more effective. 
 This book dealt with some very difficult issues, issues like rape and eating disorders, but it didn't deal with them well. The issues were dealt with dismissively, the narrator discussed them with as much emotion as if she was telling us about her last SoulCycle class. 
 I understand that everyone deals with these issues in a different way. Some dismiss them, try not to think about them. Others dwell on their pain. A good book that deals with these issue tell the story of the character--the victim---in such a way as to make the reader empathize with what they have gone through. However the character deals with their past, be it downright "I'm going to pretend it never happened" to "I can't stop thinking about it. This is killing me," the reader should FEEL it. 
 This did not happen in this book. You may argue that this is the main character's way of dealing with things, that I should infer it through her experience. Well, with all due respect, fuck that shit, this is a book. It is not the reader's burden to infer everything. If that's the case, you might as well hand me a blank book with two characters names typed on it and have me infer 600 pages. I don't think so. 
 As a narrator, the main character, the rather unfortunately named TifAni FaNelli, "Ani" (pronounced aaaaaaahh-nee), is a highly irritating one. She has one tone: glib. Again, there is zero emotion in anything she describes, from her work, to her past, to her relationships, to her descriptions of the people in her life. 
 Speaking of the people in her life, they are no better. Every single one of them is one-dimensional. Ani herself is materialistic, bitchy, constantly criticizing of others (hint: she doesn't like anyone). All the men in the book are arrogant assholes, easily manipulable if one just say the right things, offer the right promises, offer them that little bit of excitement, be the lady in the living room, the cook in the kitchen, the whore in the bedroom. All the women in the book are competitors. 
 His wife, body mean with Equinox muscles, cheery blond hair swept away from her face in a ninety-dollar blow-out. I always eye the wife first; I like to know what I'm up against. She was wearing the typical Kate uniform: white jeans, nude wedges, and a silky, sleeveless top. Hot pink, I'm sure she spent a few minutes debating it--was she tan enough, maybe the navy silky sleeveless top instead, can't go wrong with navy--and over her shoulder, a cognac Prada the exact same shade as her shoes, the perfect match more age revealing than the skin starting to pucker in her neck. She had at least ten years on me, I determined, relieved. I don't know how I'm going to live with myself when I turn thirty. 
 None of the women eat. They're all medicated up the yin-yang, spray-tanned, Botoxed Bergdorf blondes whose greatest desire in life is the ring, the husband in finance, the designer child, the summer house in Nantucket. The artificiality of it would be humorous, except that everything in this book reeks with tension-filled misery. 
 Ani's life is a giant parade in which she is the showpiece. She is clearly miserable, her life is one of an underfed bird in a gilded cage, and I have no idea why she strives so hard to maintain it. 
 Ani has as much personality as a gluten-free piece of bread. She is "shocking" to the upper class, and to the reader, because of her sexual proclivities. Hearing her describe her good qualities is simply pitiful. 
 I'm pretty--I have to work at it, but the raw materials are there. I'm four years Luke's junior, which isn't as good as eight, but still, something. I also like to do "weird" things in bed. Even though Luke and I have very different definitions of "weird" (him: doggy style and hair pulling, me: electric shocks to my pussy with a ball gag in my mouth to stifle my screams), by his standards, we have a freaky, fulfilling sex life 
 And it's not a pitiful as in "poor girl, she has so much going for her, but she doesn't realize her full potential," as much as it is "wow, what a sorry excuse for a human being. But really, what's between her legs is more interesting than what's in between her head, which is, frankly, nothing at all. 
 There is a severe disconnect between her and the reader. As a result, I have no empathy for her. I have no emotional connection with her. I do not feel her pain. I find her story boring. I find what happened to her---as atrocious as it was---to be little more than an afterthought. 
 The story is so, so dull. How can a revenge story hold so little interest? Well, read this book, and you will see how. The narrative is disruptive, jumping from her teens to her current "perfect" life, and frankly, both timelines bore the fuck out of me.