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BookDragon Blog

22 Oct / Everything You Want Me to Be by Mindy Mejia [in Library Journal]

In sleepy Pine Valley, MN, 18-year-old Hattie Hoffman – beloved daughter, excellent student, best friend, adored girlfriend, talented actress – lies dead. Solving her gruesome murder is up to local sheriff Del Goodman, a family friend who watched Hattie grow up. Her English teacher Peter Lund thought she was one of the small town’s most promising students.

And from these three perspectives – Hattie narrated by Caitlin Thorburn, Del by John Moraitis, and Peter by Jeff Harding – the “who-done-what-to-whom” gets slowly revealed over Hattie’s high school senior year.

With three characters telling the story, a corresponding triumvirate cast makes perfect sense. What’s missing, unfortunately, is a sense of continuity among the narrators so that overlapping characters remain consistently recognizable throughout: boyfriend Tommy, for example, shouldn’t sound like an affable goof from one reader and then resemble a strangely accented thug in another section. As singular narrators, all three readers are competent, with Moraitis the most convincing.

Verdict: Mindy Mejia’s (The Dragon Keeper) latest is not a particularly opaque mystery; more seasoned thrill-seekers in search of less predictable fare might look elsewhere.

Review: “Audiobooks: Xpress Reviews,” Library Journal, October 20, 2017

Readers: Young Adult, Adult

Published: 2017

By Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Fiction, Nonethnic-specific, Repost, Young Adult Readers Tags > Betrayal, BookDragon, Caitlin Thorburn, Coming-of-age, Everything You Want Me to Be, Family, Identity, Jeff Harding, John Moraitis, Library Journal, Love, Mindy Mejia, Murder
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