Thoughts on : Everything You Want Me to Be by Mindy Mejia

Posted by on March 16, 2018 1:48 am in 3 stars reads | 4 comments

Everything You Want Me to Be by Mindy Mejia
Genre : Mystery
Series : Stand alone

About the Book  :

Hattie Hoffman has spent her whole life playing many parts: the good student, the good daughter, the good girlfriend. But Hattie wants something more, something bigger, and ultimately something that turns out to be exceedingly dangerous. When she’s found brutally stabbed to death, the tragedy rips right through the fabric of her small-town community.

It soon comes to light that Hattie was engaged in a highly compromising and potentially explosive secret online relationship. The question is: Did anyone else know? And to what lengths might they have gone to end it? Hattie’s boyfriend seems distraught over her death, but had he fallen so deeply in love with her that she had become an obsession? Or did Hattie’s impulsive, daredevil nature simply put her in the wrong place at the wrong time, leading her to a violent death at the hands of a stranger?

Full of twists and turns, Everything You Want Me to Be reconstructs a year in the life of a dangerously mesmerizing young woman, during which a small town’s darkest secrets come to the forefront…and she inches closer and closer to death.

My Thoughts :

From the moment I first saw Everything You Want Me to Be at the bookstore, I knew I wanted to read it. The cover instantly caught my eye and the story seemed to be the kind of novel I enjoy reading. Small town, secrets and a brutal murder : these are some of my favorite mystery-novel ingredients!

The book is told through three points of view (Hattie, the victim; Peter, the English Teacher; and the Sheriff), and jumps through time between present and the last twelve months. Luckily the chapters are well identified and the jumps through narrators and time are never confusing. In fact, the author’s writing is quite engaging and made the reading experience a good one.

However, I felt slightly let down by the story. I’m all about small town secrets, but here everything felt quite predictable. This story has been done before, again and again, and nothing about it felt fresh or exciting to me. I don’t mind a predictable ending, even in mystery novels (especially because I read so many of them, I usually have a good read on them). But the path to the final revelation needs to interesting, surprising, scary, weird… something. Something that I, unfortunately, didn’t find here.

Predictability aside, the story wasn’t bad, and I quite enjoyed the setting. I also thought the characters were interesting and I appreciated the unlikable main characters (Hattie, Peter), though I wish we could have known a little more about the people living around them.

Overall, Everything You Want Me to Be wasn’t exactly what I was looking for, but I still enjoyed most of it and appreciated the author’s simple and engaging style. Her next novel, Leave No Trace, is scheduled for this coming September, and I’ll be curious enough to give it a try.

 

 

4 Comments

  1. The cover reminds me of Samantha from Bewitched for some odd reason. Sorry the story wasn’t quite as good as you were hoping.

    • Ha! What an interesting thing, I would never have thought of that! 😀 I can see it though. Something of her expression and her coloring, too.

  2. Having read this I thought it was really enlightening.
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    time both reading and posting comments. But so what,
    it was still worthwhile!

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