My Sweet Girl by by Amanda Jayatissa – 384 pages
ARC from Berkley and Netgalley for an honest review
Book Blurb:
Ever since she was adopted from a Sri Lankan orphanage, Paloma has had the best of everything—schools, money, and parents so perfect that she fears she’ll never live up to them.
Now at thirty years old and recently cut off from her parents’ funds, she decides to sublet the second bedroom of her overpriced San Francisco apartment to Arun, who recently moved from India. Paloma has to admit, it feels good helping someone find their way in America—that is until Arun discovers Paloma’s darkest secret, one that could jeopardize her own fragile place in this country.
Before Paloma can pay Arun off, she finds him face down in a pool of blood. She flees the apartment but by the time the police arrive, there’s no body—and no evidence that Arun ever even existed in the first place.
Paloma is terrified this is all somehow tangled up in the desperate actions she took to escape Sri Lanka so many years ago. Did Paloma’s secret die with Arun or is she now in greater danger than ever before?
My Review: 4 stars
My Sweet Girl was a book full of twists and turns I could not have imagined. I was first sold on this book because it’s written by a Sri Lankan woman and that will be a first for me. I love reading authors that hail from different parts of the world and this one took place in both Sri Lanka and in California.
This book’s plotline spun me in circles as it was chock full of unexpected surprises and unanswered questions that aren’t revealed until the end. Told by Paloma, our completely unreliable narrator, I was never sure what to believe or not believe. I just went where the story took me. It was told in two timelines, eighteen years apart, the past in Sri Lanka, the current day story in San Francisco. I liked both timelines equally, yet I found several plot holes in both. Surprisingly, the plot holes seemed to make sense because of the unreliable narrator.
The characters in this story were young so at times I felt this could easily fall into the YA category. Overall, this book will be sure to entertain fans of bizarre plots and twists galore.
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