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.
Comparisons to Gone Girl et al are inevitable but actually unfair, because this is a far better book than any of those. Mejia has an instinct for our dark places and the tight control of a writer like Jim Thompson ... Everything You Want Me to Be is a very good book. It’s a book with a point and a purpose and something to say about young women and small towns and sexuality, and it says what it has to say with none of the hysteria and drama and wall-crashing finales of some of its recent companions.
...[a] tantalizing novel ... Ms. Mejia displays the enviable ability and assurance of such contemporaries as Megan Abbott and Laura Lippman in convincingly charting inter-generational passion and angst. And she’s learned psychological truths from no less a noir master than the Bard himself, who showed that by 'our own natures, we are all inherently doomed.'”
...a page-turner ... The three voices are distinct and compelling ... Mejia does a good job of showing us how human connections can spin out of control. She also manages to make Peter sympathetic and keep the reader in suspense about who killed Hattie. By skillfully spreading suspicion over a few different characters, Mejia has made this novel a page-turner.
