Mindy Mejia

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 show more 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 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

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 show more 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 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

I was first attracted to this book by its unusual subject matter - a young, introverted zookeeper who is overly-attached to the Komodo dragon in her charge. After I started reading, I was immediately sucked in by first-time novelist Mejia's assured prose and fully-fleshed, pleasingly complicated characters including zookeeper Meg Yancy, whose prickly exterior masks a tendency to nurture; Meg's nemesis Antoine, the hotshot veterinarian known for sleeping with his interns; Ben, Meg's default show more boyfriend; and single mama Gemma, the iguana keeper intent on keeping her job. And then there's Jata, the Komodo dragon, who lays viable eggs without ever having mated - a virgin birth. Meg and Jata's peaceable kingdom is suddenly threatened by zoo politics and the mass media - and by Jata's changing nature. In addition to being smart and sexy, THE DRAGON KEEPER is a first-rate thriller. I loved this book! 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.