I instantly took to the main character, Paloma. She's unlikeable from the start—impatient, frustrated, and entirely disinterested in making a good impression on the reader or anyone else around her. Her simmering anger instantly spoke to me, because it's something that many Asian American people can understand: exhaustion from having to play the part of the model minority ... a well-written psychological thriller that kept me hooked from beginning to end (no small feat right now, as my attention span is severely limited, thanks to world events). It's also surprisingly funny—Jayatissa has a great sense of humor that serves Paloma well as she slowly reveals her full self to the reader. But the exploration of Paloma's identity and character is what really drew me to this book and has me thinking about it long after I turned the final page ... It's thoughtful and engaging, but also quite profound. It's hard to believe this novel is a debut, but it makes me incredibly excited to see what Jayatissa does next, as she has a bright future ahead of her.
... an exciting, highly original new thriller ... a terrifying and twisty tale laced with secrets and otherworldly horror ... This is compelling storytelling that Jayatissa, who lived for a time in Britain and the United States, electrifies with Paloma’s experience as a woman of color living in a predominantly White world ... Jayatissa drops dozens of clues about Paloma’s secret, but Mohini is an enormous distraction that keeps readers from seeing the truth. Long after the end of My Sweet Girl, you may imagine Mohini’s bloody fingernails clawing at your neck.
... a page-turning and often genuinely scary psychological thriller, filled with more twists and bite than a rattlesnake! It’s also a searing, brutally honest account of what it means to be a brown person and especially a brown woman in America ... I found so much of this book eminently relatable, and am so glad Amanda Jayatissa gives such uncompromising voice to people like me. Paloma is a deeply flawed heroine but her anger and complexity bring real heart and dilemma to this brilliant and audaciously crafted tale. This haunting fable showcases both how racism kills and how it helps you get away with murder. I loved it.
The frantic investigation of the present relents in chapters describing Paloma’s time at the 'Little Miracles Girls’ Home.' These moments bring an atmosphere of comparable calm and steadiness ... At times noir, psychological thriller, and ghost story, the figure of Mohini connects the novel across time and genre. Mohini in the present points to Paloma’s internal distress and the difficulty of investigating a murder in which evidence and victims tend to vanish. In the past, the story of Mohini provides a space for the girls to work out the contours of the powerful forces at play around them ... In the end, My Sweet Girl offers little in the way of repair, redemption, or feel-good anything. But the horror of the ending allows for answers that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. The novel crafts a clear argument that the world of white humanitarianism, as represented by Mrs. Evans, requires that chosen recipients be interchangeable, singularly unique, or disappear as needed.
... opens with one of the best written and darkly humorous passages I have ever read ... This is a Hitchcockian thriller of the highest order with secrets, revelations and twists around every corner right through to the very end ... a tremendous read, and I hope this is just the start of a long and prolific writing career for the talented Amanda Jayatissa.
Readers might figure out who’s who and what’s what rather quickly, but the details of how and why will require reaching the final, six-months-later chapter. Meanwhile, Jayatissa has a heyday exposing white-savior syndrome, religious hypocrisy, and mental-health system failures, with plenty of schadenfreude voyeurism.
Sri Lanka-based Jayatissa is a master of first-person narration as she delves into questions of identity—how individuals perceive themselves, and the tendency not to see others for who they really are. Her fast-paced mystery, with an unreliable but sympathetic narrator, will hook readers from the very beginning, but the twist ending might leave them disappointed and unsatisfied; the frequent profanity may also be problematic for some readers.
Woven through with incisive references to Wuthering Heights, Little Women, Oliver Twist, Enid Blyton, The Sound of Music, and, above all, the lyrics to 'Que Sera Sera,' the novel often has a dreamlike quality (read: nightmarish) that heightens its sometimes-erratic quality of psychological suspense. The back-and-forth narrative between Paloma’s childhood at the orphanage and her fraught, haunted adulthood in San Francisco nearly two decades later is a page-turner, albeit one in which some surprises mesh better than others. An uneven debut that nevertheless offers twists a-plenty.
