Everything You Want Me to Be

Everything You Want Me to Be by Mindy Mejia
This murder mystery, set in a small town in Minnesota fascinated me right off the top, with very real, deep, mesmerizing characters. An abandoned barn, a production of Shakespeare's Macbeth, and an unhappy marriage make for an interesting setting. Three main characters give us a glimpse into their world, before and after the murder, and the author had me wondering about the dark side of each one of them. The story moves back and forth in time, and only served to peak my interest. There are only two characters I was absolutely certain did not brutally murder Hattie, and that left a bevy of other possibilities. I was kept on my toes throughout.
The main character, Hattie Hoffman, is not your show more typical teenager. This 18-year-old has it all (talent, beauty, adoration, brains) but wants to be elsewhere. In her attempt to plan out and fulfill her dream of moving to NY, nothing seems to get in her way...except her death. I found her brilliant and unlikeable in her perfectness, and totally manipulative. I wondered throughout the story who would be the one to get caught in her psychotic claws, and tried to figure out how she caused her own death (did she?). She frightened me, and intrigued me, but I couldn't stop reading until I found out who would take the fall. show less

A bit of an odd duck of a murder mystery/thriller. Some very flawed characters who I ended up sympathizing with, some good, salt-of-the-earth Midwesterners, including the detective, who I didn’t, and a heart-wrenching ending, despite the fact that we know our girl is dead from the get-go. That ending, though—it really made me feel the loss of all our girl’s promise and potential in a way I usually don’t for the victims of mysteries.

When the story begins, eighteen-year-old Hattie is running away from her small Minnesota town to New York City, but is stopped at the airport and returns home; a couple of weeks later, she is dead, stabbed to death in a remote abandoned barn. The story is narrated by three characters--the sheriff investigating the murder, Hattie's English teacher, Peter, and Hattie herself--and it jumps around in time to describe the events leading up to the murder. This review will contain unmarked spoilers.

Mejia is a good author, she has depicted her characters well, and her skill ultimately made this book so much more infuriating than I think it would have been if it were simply another bad thriller. Hattie is a precocious but otherwise normal show more teenage girl, trying on various identities and figuring out who she wants to be, and not only is she brutally murdered because of this, but at the end, it is used against her to justify her own murder. Peter, her teacher, is a character I loathed almost from the beginning, but I think we are meant to sympathize with him. He estranges himself from his wife simply because she becomes wrapped up in caring for her dying mother--showing no empathy for the pain she is going through--and begins flirting with Hattie online, neither of them knowing who the other is. They start an online affair--bad enough--but when Hattie figures out who Peter is and reveals herself to him, he only weakly tries to get off the damaging path he is on. After a few protests, he continues the affair physically, rationalizing it in so many unconvincing ways: Hattie just turned eighteen and is an adult, he can't help himself, she wouldn't "let" him stop. Hattie is naive and inexperienced, and unless your age also ends in "teen," you have no justification for sleeping with one. None. Peter is the adult, he can help himself, he is fundamentally selfish and terrible to his wife, and I just despised him. Honestly, I kept reading not because I thought he killed Hattie, but because I wanted to see if he would get some comeuppance.

Major spoiler alert! No, he doesn't, not really, and the sheriff--who up until the end I had actually liked--seems to become sympathetic to Peter and his "plight," to the point where he concludes that Hattie's playing at different roles was what got her killed and that maybe she deserved to be murdered. No, she did not. She didn't deserve to be taken advantage of by an adult, either, or treated like a possession by her football-player boyfriend. I have read this kind of thing before (including in the news), but I expected a bit more nuance from a female writer (which maybe I shouldn't have), and Mejia's talent only made the whole thing more gross--particularly in light of the current exposure of pervasive sexual harassment, especially directed at young women. I finished this book feeling angry and wondering when adult men will actually be held as responsible for their actions as all girls and women, no matter what their age, are. show less

This is the second book released this week set in Minnesota. While History of Wolves is set in the isolated northern portion of the state, Everything You Want Me to Be is set in the rural middle. Both tend to show the native Minnesotans as hardworking, staid, and loyal. Both have young female main characters, but that is where the similarities end. Unlike Linda, Hattie is vibrant and constantly in the figurative and literal spotlight. She excels in school and in theater. Everyone loves her, and her universal appeal establishes her as a shining star within the town. As such, her disappearance and later her body cause a major stir among her family and friends as well as the entire town.

Everything You Want Me to Be is as much a murder show more mystery as it is a novel about the various faces we have and the roles we play for each. There is the external ones for our friends, our coworkers, our manager, our fellow churchgoers, our community, and so forth. Then there is the internal one that never really sees the light of day. This is where we hide our most basic elements of ourselves, our desires, our intelligence, our biases. While we like to think that our loved ones know this inner self, the truth is that there will always be a small part of ourselves we hold back from even our most trusted friend.

So it goes with Hattie, a natural actress in every part of the word. She freely admits that she is a young woman with many faces, finely attuned to what her audience needs to see and hear from her and adept at adopting that. This skill has gotten her far, but as we soon find out, she has tired of her constant acting and longs for someone to know the real her. Enter the mysterious new English teacher and the ensuing drama.

In addition to the murder mystery, Everything You Want Me to Be is also a tragedy. A beautiful, young, talented woman on the cusp of greatness is dead and a community is rocked to its core by not only her murder but also the secrets that come to light during the investigation. However, that is not the true tragedy. The true tragedy lies in the fact that Hattie thinks so little of herself that she feels she has to act in order to make friends and please others, that she cannot be even somewhat true to herself when interacting with her parents. Hattie’s story is a great example of the problems that occur when you try to please everyone and fail to stay true to yourself in the process. show less

Everything You Want Me to Be is an intriguing mystery by Mindy Mejia. Del Goodman is the gruff small town sheriff of Pine Valley, a small farming town outside Rochester, Minnesota who must solve the shocking murder of Hattie Hoffman, a high school senior and the daughter of his best friend. She is found stabbed, her face mutilated beyond recognition, and lying half in and half out of a lake outside town. It is the kind of murder that would shock and frighten any community, not least a small town where that sort of thing is just not supposed to happen.

The story opens with Hattie Hoffman’s abortive attempt to run away from home and her realization that she was wasting her life by playing different parts, depending on who she was talking show more to, always fulfilling expectations of others, but not her own. She suddenly understand who she is, what she wants, and how to get it. Three weeks later, Sheriff Goodman is investigating her murder.

The story is narrated in alternating chapters that progress through Hattie’s final school year and the investigation, narrated by Hattie, Del, and Peter Lund, the new high school English teacher. Peter is a transplant from Minneapolis who moved to Pine Valley when his mother-in-law’s heart failure needed full-time care. Elsa does not like her son-in-law much and Mary redirects all her anger, frustration, and worry about her mother at Peter. He escapes to literature while she changes from the woman he loved into a stranger.

Mejia is from Minnesota and beautifully describes the way the wide open landscape, the gentle rolling hills with only a few clusters of trees for windbreaks and an expansive sky with an endless horizon made people fear God. As the Sheriff saw it, in the cities people didn’t see the unbroken sky and got the crazy idea they were in charge. Place has an important role in this story because Hattie and Peter are two people who are so very out of place. They don’t belong in Pine Valley and they long to leave.

Because they don’t belong, because they need to be with their kind of people, both Peter and Hattie participate in an online community that discusses plays, literature, and the arts. They only know each other by their handles, HollyG and LitGeek, and through many conversations about books, they begin to fall in love. When Hattie discovers LitGeek is her English teacher, she is thrilled. When Peter discovers HollyG is his student he is horrified. Much of the school year is spent with her pursuing him and his efforts to resist her.

To complicate matters, Hattie starts dating Tommy, a football player who adores her, but is not smart enough to realize she is just going through the motions, doing the high school thing of having a boyfriend. He’s pushing her for sex, but she does not care enough for him. He is a cover for her to pursue Peter, an arm accessory to pacify her friends and family.

Some of my favorite passages in the book are when Peter and Hattie discuss literature. Their discussion of Tim O’Brien’s masterful The Things They Carried was exceptional. It’s an example of how teachers should be teaching literature. It was easy to see why Hattie and Peter fell in love.

Everything You Want Me to Be is interesting, the story moves quickly and the characters are believable and are people you will care about. The setting is beautifully realized and very much an important part of the story. This is a story about being out of place. I was interested throughout, but I cannot love this book. In the end, when all was said and done, I really disliked the book. Yes, it is well-written. Yes, it is intriguing, with complex characters. Yes, sometimes the writing is downright poetic. But the author’s judgment, put in the Sheriff’s mouth is that Hattie is to blame. He says the murderer is no murderer…it’s Hattie’s fault.

I suppose it is a reflection of how much the author made me care about the characters that when Sheriff Goodman (Whose name I want to change to anything but Good-man) made that appalling judgment I was infuriated. It is a reflection of how much I had come to care that I am still angry the next day. So, yeah, the book is good in one way, which makes it even worse when it crosses that line into egregiously and wrongly blaming the victim.

No, Hattie is not to blame. The only worldview that puts the blame on her is one that mistakes love for ownership. Did Mary kill Hattie because Peter cheated with her? Did Peter kill Hattie to silence her or to keep her from leaving him for New York? Did Tommy kill her because she used him? No matter who did it, someone was claiming ownership, claiming that because they loved, that love must be reciprocated. And yes, Hattie demanded that because she loved Peter, he must love her. No one seems to believe in unrequited love, do they?

Being reckless with people’s emotions, being careless, thoughtless and irresponsible are part of being a teenager. Hattie was smart, funny, and self-centered. That is not a cause for murder. The killer chose to kill. Hattie did not make the killer act, that was a choice and putting it on Hattie just reinforces the idea that people somehow belong to others, that people can make demands that ignore the agency and rights of another by claiming it is in the name of love. That’s not love.

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Hattie Hoffman was looking forward to her senior year at Pine Valley HS. Finally, the end is in sight & she can almost touch her dream of moving to New York & taking Broadway by storm. Seven months later that dream is dead & so is Hattie.

Pine Valley is a typical rural farming community. Those who live there work hard, know their neighbours & have long memories. There’s not a lot to offer young people with big ideas. And when Hattie’s mutilated body is found in an abandoned barn, everyone feels the loss.

Sheriff Del Goodman is gutted by the news. He’s known Hattie since close friends Bud & Mona Hoffman brought her home from the hospital & promises he’ll find her killer. But Del has no idea just how many people have something to show more hide, not least of whom is Hattie.

The story opens with the discovery of her body in April 2008 then goes back to the previous fall. We meet the players & follow events that put several of them on paths that will tragically collide in the spring. In alternate chapters set in the present, Del pulls out all the stops & is unnerved by what he discovers as the investigation progresses.

It’s one of those books where the less you know going in, the better. There are some bombshells ahead & you really want them to drop in order for a maximum WTH experience. The author provides a slow drip of clues that influence your thinking & put you at risk of developing whiplash as you swing from one suspect to the next.

It’s well written & the reader is invested in the outcome from the first page. But be prepared for an emotional ride. Ms. Mejia has a suitcase of skills & excels at creating characters who are complex & believable. Hattie in particular is a heartbreaking example of what it’s like to be 17. You’ll find yourself remembering what it felt like to be bullet-proof with endless possibilities ahead of you. It’s a time when the passion of first love & the belief you can be anything are so vivid, not yet diluted by the practicalities of real life. She’s smart, funny & infuriating. Some of her actions will make you laugh, others will make you want to shake some sense into her. In other words, a typical teenager.

On a deeper level, it’s a cautionary tale for all ages about the consequences of our actions. Not just for ourselves, but the ripple effect on people in our lives. As Hattie’s English teacher says “what could happen to any of us?……if we pursue our darkest desires? What do we lose of ourselves when we cross that line? What does it cost those around us?”

Tension continues to build as the 2 time lines converge & Del uncovers the truth. And it’s only then you realize just how many others also had dreams that died with Hattie. I dare you to finish this & leave the characters behind on the page. My guess is they’ll stick with you for a bit & I highly recommend it as a pick for your next book club. show less

Falling within the nearly-not-crime-fiction-at-all genre, THE LAST ACT OF HATTIE HOFFMAN (aka EVERYTHING YOU WANT ME TO BE) explores the nature of identity. How do we learn who we are? Can we choose who to be? Can we truly have multiple identities or is there always a true self? That it does this against the backdrop of the investigation into a young girl’s murder in a Minnesota farming community is almost (but not quite) incidental.

The story unfolds in two time frames, roughly a year apart, and from three different perspectives. We learn of the book’s key dramatic event – Hattie Hoffman’s murder – early on then one thread of the novel flashes back through the months that led up to it, while the other moves forward, showing show more how hard it is for the people who loved her to discover Hattie’s secrets. That she was not the Hattie they thought they knew. This kind of complicated narrative structure is becoming more popular but not every author carries it off with as much skill as Mejia has done with only her second full-length novel. The structure served a real purpose here; providing most of the tension and allowing the key character developments to be revealed more precisely than a standard narrative might have done.

Henrietta, Hattie to her friends, Hoffman is 17 at the earliest stages of the book and has not long turned 18 when she is murdered. She yearns to live in New York. Possibly as an actress but that’s not as important as just being there: geographically and psychologically far removed from Pine Valley, Minnesota. Hattie is already an actress though, both on stage and off it, easily portraying the girl other people need or want her to be. A doting daughter, a BFF, a footballer’s girlfriend…Is she being manipulative or just trying on skins to find the right one? And either way, do her actions warrant her being stabbed to death?

Del Goodman is Pine Valley’s Sheriff. We don’t know exactly how old he is but he must be pushing retirement age as he served in Vietnam and these events are taking place across 2007-2008. He feels more than usually invested in the case because Hattie’s father, Bud, is his best friend. He has watched Hattie grow up and, without children of his own, he feels close to Hattie and also feels he knows her. Or at least a version of her.

Peter Lund is the high school English teacher. He’s moved to Pine Valley from Minneapolis because his wife needed to move home to look after her ailing mother. He is stifled by small town life and the fact he seems unable to fit in. His interests are shared by few people there – not even his wife as she focuses on caring for her mother and the demanding chicken farm – and their interests are completely foreign to him. Peter’s view of himself as a person is shown to be out of sync with the person he actually is.

THE LAST ACT OF HATTIE HOFFMAN is an unsettling, surprising, compelling and ultimately very satisfying read. The story is a ripper yarn and the characters much more layered than the blurb would have you believe. For the record I prefer ‘our’ title than the US one because it turns out to have several real meanings and seems to more thoroughly encapsulate this excellent story but whatever it’s called where you live I highly recommend this book. show less