Everything You Want Me to Be (Mejia)

Everything You Wanted Me to Be 
Mindy Mejia, 2017
Atria
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781501123429


Summary
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.

High school senior Hattie Hoffman has spent her whole life playing many parts: the good student, the good daughter, the good citizen.

When she’s found brutally stabbed to death on the opening night of her high school play, the tragedy rips through the fabric of her small town community.

Local sheriff Del Goodman, a family friend of the Hoffmans, vows to find her killer, but trying to solve her murder yields more questions than answers.

It seems that Hattie’s acting talents ran far beyond the stage. Told from three points of view—Del, Hattie, and the new English teacher whose marriage is crumbling—Everything You Want Me to Be weaves the story of Hattie’s last school year and the events that drew her ever closer to her 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? (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1979
• Where—Minneapolis, Minnesota
• Education—B.A., University of Minnesota; M.F.A., Hamline University
• Currently—lives in the Twin Cities, Minnesota


Mindy Mejia is an American author, best known for her suspense novels, Everything You Want Me to Be (2017) and Leave No Trace (2018). She was born and raised in the Twin Cities, Minnesota. She loved to write even as a child: her mother gave her a journal when she was 11, and Mindy continued writing throughout high school for the speech team and school literary magazine. In college she took a few writing courses. As she said in an interview on the blog, The Suspense is Killing Me,

Half-finished novels and story fragments littered my life during the 90’s. I began much more than I ever seemed to finish.

Mejia earned her B.A. from the University of Minnesota and afterward headed to the corporate world, eventually becoming a financial manager in an electronics firm. She continued to write on her lunch breaks, and went back to school to get her MFA. Her award-winning thesis project became her first novel, The Dragon Keeper, which was published by Ashland Creek Press in 2012. Five years later Emily Bestler Books published her second novel, Everything You Wanted Me to Be.

Mejia's short stories have been published in rock, paper, scissors; Things Japanese: An Anthology of Short Stories; and THIS Literary Magazine. Her next novel, Leave No Trace, is due out in 2018 from Emily Bestler Books.

She now writes full time and lives in the Twin Cities with her husband and children. (Author bio courtesy of the author.)

Book Reviews
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.
Wall Street Journal


[A] fast read with a bright, clean style. The ending should launch some ferocious debates.
New York Journal of Books


Mejia's novel is full of suspense, intrigue and twists at every turn. The reader is transported into three different worlds as they try to figure out who committed a horrendous crime. Told from three different perspectives, this is a fantastic read that wastes no time in drawing the reader into the story.
Romance Times


Buckle up for this killer mystery in which identity, truth, and self-discovery take some fatal turns.
Bustle


The story occasionally drags, and the murder’s resolution seems almost like an afterthought, but Mejia adroitly charts Hattie’s development. Peter, initially sympathetic, becomes cloying, while Del...emerges as the most compelling...of the trio.
Publishers Weekly


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


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.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our generic mystery questions to set you in the right direction...then take off on your own:

GENERIC DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Mystery / Crime / Suspense Thrillers

1. Talk about the characters, both good and bad. Describe their personalities and motivations. Are they fully developed and emotionally complex? Or are they flat, one-dimensional heroes and villains?

2. What do you know...and when do you know it? At what point in the book do you begin to piece together what happened?

3. Good crime writers embed hidden clues in plain sight, slipping them in casually, almost in passing. Did you pick them out, or were you...clueless? Once you've finished the book, go back to locate the clues hidden in plain sight. How skillful was the author in burying them?

4. Good crime writers also tease us with red-herrings—false clues—to purposely lead readers astray? Does your author try to throw you off track? If so, were you tripped up?

5. Talk about the twists & turns—those surprising plot developments that throw everything you think you've figured out into disarray.

1. Do they enhance the story, add complexity, and build suspense?
2. Are they plausible or implausible?
3. Do they feel forced and gratuitous—inserted merely to extend the story?

6. Does the author ratchet up the suspense? Did you find yourself anxious—quickly turning pages to learn what happened? A what point does the suspense start to build? Where does it climax...then perhaps start rising again?

7. A good ending is essential in any mystery or crime thriller: it should ease up on tension, answer questions, and tidy up loose ends. Does the ending accomplish those goals?

1. Is the conclusion probable or believable?
2. Is it organic, growing out of clues previously laid out by the author (see Question 3)?
3. Or does the ending come out of the blue, feeling forced or tacked-on?
4. Perhaps it's too predictable.
5. Can you envision a different or better ending?

8. Are there certain passages in the book—ideas, descriptions, or dialogue—that you found interesting or revealing...or that somehow struck you? What lines, if any, made you stop and think?

9. Overall, does the book satisfy? Does it live up to the standards of a good crime story or suspense thriller? Why or why not?

(Generic Mystery Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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