[Review] Everything You Want Me to Be - by Mindy Mejia

Summary: High school senior Hattie Hoffman has spent her whole life playing many parts: the good student, the good daughter, the good citizen. When she’s found brutally stabbed to death on the opening night of her high school play, the tragedy rips through the fabric of her small town community. Local sheriff Del Goodman, a family friend of the Hoffmans, vows to find her killer, but trying to solve her murder yields more questions than answers. It seems that Hattie’s acting talents ran far beyond the stage. Told from three points of view—Del, Hattie, and the new English teacher whose marriage is crumbling—Everything You Want Me to Be weaves the story of Hattie’s last school year and the events that drew her ever closer to her death. (Pub Date: Jan 03, 2017)


Review based on an ARC provided by Netgalley. I want to also thank the publisher for giving me this opportunity.

I needed a few hours to recover from this book. This was bitter, heartbreaking.

Hattie was the star of the school player, every teacher's favorite student but she was brutally murdered. Now, sheriff Del struggles to piece back a Hattie that looks far from the girl he remembered, and his suspect list might not be as empty as it had seemed at the start.

I wasn't ready for this. I do have this tendency to forget summaries and then just have general ideas of the book genre when I start reading. And boy, did I have this one wrong. First scene we see Hattie, a broken-hearted girl desperate to get away at all cost. So easy to relate to her. To my shock, she is dead in the opening of the following chapter.

The story was told from three different points of views as well as in two timelines—the beginning of the conflict and the discovery of the body. Another surprise for me is how different Hattie sounds when we're taken back to how it all started. This time, I found it hard to really care about her, always pretending, always perfect. This author had an amazing grip at character development and voice.

The second character is Peter, the English teacher. Here we go the reverse way. He starts as being the poor man who is stuck with an unhappy marriage but is this brilliant, lovable new teacher. The two actually get closer not because of that relationship and yet it is what defines them to the end, when Peter is already disturbed and at the very least unstable. It got to a point I could only feel disgust for the man he turned out to be.

 I don't have much to say about Del. It was funny how he did have a background, he was personally involved with the case, too. Still, he was much more of a stand in for the reader. I can't say I didn't enjoy that—I was too invested in knowing what exactly had gone wrong that Hattie had to be like that.

I can't say this was dark, twisted but the topics are sensitive. The romance between a teacher and their student is never an easy plot, and this one is no exception. But this was also a self-discovery story for Hattie until she could become simply herself. And it's so hard—you know the end.

The book wasn't perfect though. I feel around the end the scenes were not so carefully written, even if they were still superior to your average book. Also, this book's advertising concentrates on the escalating plot twists. Indeed, there are some; they kept me interested all right. Nevertheless, they weren't all that. I didn't guess the ending but it didn't overwhelm me—the book as a whole did, though.

This wasn't a love story or an exciting thriller, or even an investigations book, and of course I couldn't call it a YA, either. But I'd say the mix of genres turned out very well. Definitely a release to look forward to in 2017.

Rating: 4 out 5.