Review: "Everything You Want Me to Be" by Mindy Mejia

My rating: ★★★★☆

"She had multiple personalities; it was the only explanation. She was dangerous, calculating, diabolical, and . . . brilliant. She was fucking brilliant."

The central narrative of this psychological thriller revolves around the question of whether you can truly know someone or not, even if you claim to be close.

That someone in this book is Hattie Hoffman, 18, who has everything any girl her age wants but thinks she'll fit better in a bigger pond than small-town Minnesota. She has it all figured out: She'll move to New York right after graduating high school to pursue her dreams of becoming a professional actress. Yet as chapter two opens, we see that her promising future was expunged just months before graduation when her body was found brutally stabbed to death. The news shook the entire town. As the plot thickens, we learned that she has been involved in an online relationship that might make or break her already fractured psyche, having transformed herself into whatever everybody wanted her to be her entire life. One minute we witness the great lengths she's willing to go in order to get what she wants, and then we're bemused by her charming wits the next. It's not difficult to summon this irresistible, hauntingly beautiful girl to mind - she's her teacher's pet, a good daughter, a great listener to all her friends, and her boyfriend's obsession - she can be everything you want her to be. But as we move closer to revealing the killer's identity, readers will no doubt ask themselves: Is she the victim, or the villain?

"You say you're just acting, but you're fracturing yourself into a thousand pieces, and every time I see another piece, you're gone again. You turn into someone else, a crowd of someone elses, and it makes me wonder if there's any such thing as Hattie Hoffman."

A whodunit's biggest challenge is to keep the readers unceasingly engaged. For a relatively new author, I must say “Everything You Want Me To Be” is distressingly engrossing. Totally unputdownable every time I pick it up, and no choppy chapters that are commonplace in thrillers. From one revelation to the next, suspense is constant and gradual, and Mejia really took advantage of the three-part narrative that flowed seamlessly between chapters. The story is told in flashbacks by three distinct voices, Del Goodman, the sheriff investigating Hattie's case, Peter Lund, Hattie's English teacher, and Hattie herself. So far I haven't come across authors that was able to drive the plot this masterfully without compromising the cogency of its characters. For each voice she delved into their context down to their emotional gravitas while carefully weaving the story arcs of each voice to reconstruct Hattie's final year alive. As one suspect emerges, the following chapter threads through the tension before another overlooked detail was brought to light. Readers will have to question every plausible motive behind each surmise the whole time. 

"Most people think acting is make-believe. Like it's a big game where people put on costumes and feign kisses or stab wounds and then pretend to gasp and die. They think it's a show. They don't understand that acting is becoming someone else, changing your thoughts and needs until you don't remember your own anymore. You let the other person invade everything you are and then you turn yourself inside out, spilling their identity onto the stage like a kind of bloodletting. Sometimes I think acting is a disease, but I can't say for sure because I don't know what it's like to be healthy."

Speaking of characters, there's so many underlying themes besides identity and deception. At its core, I believe any girl who's gone through the volatile period of early adulthood can relate with Hattie's need to spread herself too thin, and I'm no different. Anyone who's experienced grief and loss would also understand Del's cynical perspective - you'll admire his solidity during the entire investigation even though he's close with the Hoffmans. For the married, you'll also sympathize with Peter's crumbling marriage, which ultimately pushed him to drop everything else defining his life other than his love for literature and drama.

Reading the book is like watching an attempt of painting a portrait of the most contradicting girl in town using distorted colors. Hattie Hoffman may have acted her way through getting the life she thinks she deserves, but she might also have led to her own tragic fate in the finale. Excellent book! So well-written and developed that you'll never notice the modest plot.

"You knew you were playing it right when your audience was happy. They smiled and praised you and told each other how wonderful you were. Maybe part of you wished they'd see past the act, even once, and tell you Bridget Jones-style that they liked you just for who you were, but that never happened. No one wanted to go see independent movies with you. They laughed at the books you were reading and thought you were snobby because of the way you talked. So you put on the show, waiting for your real life to begin someday. And the applause made things inside of you warm that you hadn't even known needed to be warmed up. The real you might be so much colder. So you kept doing it."

See this book on Goodreads.