Everything You Want Me To Be

Cover image and synopsis from Goodreads:

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?

I was on a big mystery kick last year, and I think that will continue in 2018. Everything You Want Me To Be is a book I’d heard some good things about, so I decided to check it out.

I was torn on my rating for this book because I enjoyed it while I was reading it, but I am not sure that it’s a standout for me.  I thought this was an interesting, well-written book. I liked that the story was narrated by three different characters, the setting, and the way the story jumped back and forth in time. While the mystery was well done and kept my interest, it wasn’t surprising in the end.

I can’t put my finger on it, but I didn’t get a sense that this book would stay with me or that it would stand out from the other mysteries I’ve read over the past few months. I keep thinking that means I need to take a break from mysteries, but I so want to read something that truly surprises me or resonates with me. I’ll keep looking!