Everything You Want Me to Be in Around the World in 80 Books

Apr 01, 2017 Nadine in NY Jones rated it it was ok

Shelves: psych-psych-psych, mystery, r2017-in-2017, stayed-up-way-too-late, wouldnt-normally-read

"False face must hide what the false heart doth know." -- Macbeth

I was pretty excited to read this, it sounded like a modern spin on the old who killed Laura Palmer? mystery. There is some of that here, but sadly it is a rather trite tale, no quirky twists to be had. DO NOT go into this expecting Twin Peaks awesomeness, you will be disappointed.

My main complaint is that this is told from three POVs: Hattie (a sixteen year old girl eager to escape her boring hometown for the bright l

"False face must hide what the false heart doth know." -- Macbeth

I was pretty excited to read this, it sounded like a modern spin on the old who killed Laura Palmer? mystery. There is some of that here, but sadly it is a rather trite tale, no quirky twists to be had. DO NOT go into this expecting Twin Peaks awesomeness, you will be disappointed.

My main complaint is that this is told from three POVs: Hattie (a sixteen year old girl eager to escape her boring hometown for the bright lights of Broadway - also, the murder victim), Del (the 60 or 70 year old sheriff of Pine Valley, and close friends with Hattie's dad), and Paul (twenty-something high school English teacher frustrated by his wife's insistence that they move from Minneapolis to Pine Valley to care for her elderly mother). Those should be three very different voices, but they all sound the same. Writers just love to tell a story from multiple POVs, but they really shouldn't do it if they can't pull off unique voices for each character.

I was just so disappointed in this book. I thought I had guessed who the murderer was well in advance, but I was wrong, but that did little to improve my overall opinion. I don't really get hung up on that, a book's "goodness" for me is not determined by whether or not I can guess who did it. I'm just disappointed because it was so trite.

The parallels between Shakespeare's Macbeth and this story got old fast, too. Instead of enriching this book, the frequent mentions of Macbeth just kept reminding me how shallow and empty THIS story was.

Plus, I'm just so tired of books that show all of the women as awful. Here we go again, the women is the evil manipulator, the man is the hapless victim. The only woman in this story who is not a shallow or manipulative bitch (or at death's door) is Hattie's mother, Mona. At the end, the sheriff blames Hattie for her own murder. (view spoiler)

It's too bad we never got the POV of Paul's wife, Mary. I think her story would have been interesting, she had a lot of conflicts to deal with: between what she thought she wanted and what she actually wants, between caring for her ailing mother and building her new marriage, between what her mother wants and what her husband wants, between life in the big city and life in her hometown ...

On the plus side, this was a real page turner, and I stayed up far too late reading it. So, it's got that going for it! ...more

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Aug 04, 2019 Juliana Philippa rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 4-to-5-stars, 0-reviewed, 4-half-stars, mystery-thriller-suspense, psychological-thriller-and-suspense, first-person-narrator, third-person-narrator, 0-audiobook, alternating-pov, 0-available-on-scribd

— Check out my Apr 2020 and Jul 2020 #Bookstagram posts —

4.5 stars
This was one of my fav reads of 2019, a year in which I read far more mystery/thriller type books than I ever have before. This one was SUPERB.

It’s told nonlinearly from various points of view, and centers around Hattie, a HS senior who is found brutally stabbed to death. We watch her senior year unfold, hurtling is towards her violent end, while also following the subsequent murder investigation and seeing the destructions that h — Check out my Apr 2020 and Jul 2020 #Bookstagram posts —

4.5 stars
This was one of my fav reads of 2019, a year in which I read far more mystery/thriller type books than I ever have before. This one was SUPERB.

It’s told nonlinearly from various points of view, and centers around Hattie, a HS senior who is found brutally stabbed to death. We watch her senior year unfold, hurtling is towards her violent end, while also following the subsequent murder investigation and seeing the destructions that her life and death wrought. The two timelines kind of track one another, slowly building the tension as we get closer and closer to discovering what really happened to Hattie.

EXCERPT:

Most people think acting is make-believe. Like it’s a big game where people put on costumes and feign kisses or stab wounds and then pretend to gasp and die. They think it’s a show. They don’t understand that acting is becoming someone else, changing your thoughts and needs until you don’t remember your own anymore. You let the other person invade everything you are and then you turn yourself inside out, spilling their identity onto the stage like a kind of bloodletting. Sometimes I think acting is a disease, but I can’t say for sure because I don’t know what it’s like to be healthy.
[...]
You knew you were playing it right when your audience was happy. They smiled and praised you and told each other how wonderful you were. Maybe part of you wish they’d see past the act, even once, and tell you Bridge Jones-style that they liked you just for who you were, but that never happened. No one wanted to go see independent movies with you. They laughed at the books you were reading and thought you were snobby because of the way you talked. So you put on the show, waiting for your real life to begin someday. And the applause made things inside of you warm that you hadn’t even known needed to be warmed up. The real you might be so much colder. So you kept doing it.

I’d acted my entire life and so far it’d only gotten me here, to the first day fo senior year at Pine Valley High School.

...more

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Jan 17, 2021 Rachel N. rated it liked it

Shelves: mystery, minnesota, read-in-2021

2.5 stars, rounded up. Hattie Hoffman is found murdered in an abandoned barn. She seemed to be the perfect high school senior with the lead in the school play and plans to move to New York after graduation. The book alternates between sheriff Del who is friends with Hattie's family and investigating her death, English teacher Peter Lund and Hattie-the last two narrating events leading up to the murder. No one in this book was likeable, except minimally the sheriff who was mostly boring. I didn't ...more

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