Everything you want me to be : a novel

Title:

Author:

Mejia, Mindy, author.

Personal Author:

Mejia, Mindy, author.

ISBN:

9781501123429

Edition:

First Emily Bestler Books/Atria Books hardcover edition.

Physical Description:

340 pages ; 24 cm

Abstract:

Hattie Hoffman has spent her whole life playing many parts: the good student, the good daughter, the good girlfriend. When she's found brutally stabbed to death, the tragedy rips right through the fabric of her small-town community. 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 her death.--Page 4 of cover.

Genre:

Suspense fiction.

Summary:

Holds:

Available:*

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On Order

Summary

People 's Best New Books Pick

The Wall Street Journal 's Best New Mysteries

"Fans of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl will devour this fast-paced story." -- InStyle

"Readers drawn to this compelling psychological thriller because of its shared elements with Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl (2012) will be pleasantly surprised to discover that Mejia's confident storytelling pulls those themes into an altogether different exploration of manipulation and identity." -- Booklist (starred review)

2017's Best Fiction Books -- Bustle

12 Books Gone Girl Fans Should Have on Their Wish List -- BookBub

No one knows who she really is...

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.

Evocative and razor-sharp, Everything You Want Me to Be challenges you to test the lines between innocence and culpability, identity and deception. Does love lead to self-discovery--or destruction?

Reviews (1)

Kirkus Review

A teenage girl's murder splits apart a rural Minnesota community, uncovering not only her secrets, but also those of the town.Like so many teenagers living in small towns, 18-year-old Hattie Hoffman wanted out of Pine Valley. Specifically, she wanted to go to New York City, where she envisioned acting on Broadway. Instead, she ended up stabbed to death in a barn weeks before graduation after a rave performance as Lady Macbeth in that Scottish play. Mejia, making her adult debut after The Dragon Keeper (2012), a book for teens, alternates perspective, building up to the day Hattie dies in Hattie's own voice and in the days and weeks after, from the points of view of the cookie-cutter town sheriff and the obvious suspect, Hattie's English teacher, as he stumbles through his predictably crumbling marriage. Hattie is a master manipulator, so much so that it's often difficult to believe she's only 18; when the flirtation with teacher Peter Lund, which begins online, blossoms into a full-blown affair, it's frustrating that the adult appears to be the one for whom the author is trying to elicit more sympathy rather than the high school student with whom he's having sex. Sheriff Del Goodman functions less as a character and more as a vehicle to move the story along: someone has to solve Hattie's murder, so it may as well be him. In the year leading up to her death, as Hattie prepares her grand exit, her death seems inevitable not owing to the way she lived, but because Mejia stays so far within what are safe narrative boundaries. There's an attempt at profundity here that falls flat, leaving instead a story we've seen before of a pretty girl who winds up dead and the usual cast of suspects who may have killed her. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.