ARC Review: My Sweet Girl

 

I received an ARC of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. This did not affect my opinion of the book or my review itself.

This is the definition of a haunting read.

Paloma was plucked from a Sri Lankan orphanage and taken to America, her new parents promising everything she and the other girls had always dreamed of. But now an adult Paloma is estranged from her supposed saviours, viewed as a disappointment by everyone who knows her, and threatened by the man subletting in her apartment, who has discovered her deepest most devestating secret.

But when that man is found dead by Paloma in her apartment, and then the body and blood disappear by the time the police arrive, Paloma feels the increasingly creeping dread that her past has come back to find her and this time it's not letting go.

What's especially eerie with this unreliable narrator is that sometimes even she isn't sure how unreliable she is. Is she really seeing the terrifying ghost of her childhood? Why doesn't she remember strange actions others swear they saw her do? Is it the drinking or something else? 

Then there are the things we readers know Paloma isn't telling us, in particular the overhanging life changing shattering secret that keeps being mentioned but never told. And I have to admit, when that secret was revealed, I was completely shaken. I never saw it coming, and everything that it meant just ripped everything that had come before out at the foundations. I'm honestly still thinking about those last few chapters and what they meant.

I would definitely recommend this book. It's eerie, it's an unreliable narrator who can't even trust herself, it's a giant secret from the past slowly brought into the light through tense flashbacks. It's a social commentary on what it means to be seen as a "brown person" an "Indian person" by those around you who don't try to know any better, it's seemingly small lies that shock when the truth behind them is finally revealed. It's women's faces in the windows in the pitch black night and the knowledge that maybe that ghost story from your childhood just might be real and looking straight back at you.