My Sweet Girl is about a young girl who is adopted from an orphanage in Sri Lanka, leaving her friends behind, when she moves with her new parents to America. Now, Paloma is a young woman, and goes to her apartment to find her roommate, Arun, dead. However, when she awakens from a drunken night, the body is gone. She starts to think she is going crazy. She returns to her parents' home, but she is haunted by a monster that the girls in the orphanage believed was present.
There is a big twist in the story.
Reasons for my rating-Paloma came across as a whiny and unstable drunk. Her voice was irritating to me. Plus, the use of the F word was so prevalent, I thought that could have been cut by 50% at least! I also had a good inkling of the twist early on. ( )

This book goes back and forth from the present time around San Francisco and 18 years earlier in an orphanage for young girls in Sri Lanka. Mr. and Mrs. Evans visit the orphanage and manage to adopt 12-year old Paloma who could not believe her good fortune although she felt bad about leaving her good friend, Lihini. In the present day, Paloma is drinking along with her psychological medications and losing chunks of time when people around her start disappearing-- Arun, her Indian roommate who tries to blackmail her and Ida, her parents' next-door neighbor. She meets Sam, another person from Sri Lanka, when she is trying to figure out what happened to Arun. The ending is somewhat confusing. ( )

Violent and vulgar, and I'm not adverse to dropping frequent "f-bombs". Thriller with predictable ending. ( )

What is it about unlikeable main characters? Is it because readers waste no time in empathizing with them, so the story moves forward easily? Paloma is troubled. She should have had the ideal childhood. Adopted by a San Francisco couple from a Sri Lankan orphanage, she should have had the ideal childhood. But she remains aloof from friends, easy to anger and has turned to alcohol to help her survive. The reader knows she has hidden something terrible from that time in the orphanage, but Paloma’s narration is so unreliable, its not till the end of the book, we know what it is and that not all her hallucinations are that. She is in danger and this twisted psychological tale will rivet the reader to the end. ( )

There should be a bright future ahead of author Amanda Jayatissa, and I'm basing my opinion simply on how her mind worked as she constructed the plot for My Sweet Girl. There are enough twists and turns to satisfy any reader who loves surprises-- or who loves to attempt to figure them out ahead of time. The book does fall victim to a couple of things that did lessen my enjoyment, however.

At 384 pages, the book has "too much middle," as a fellow mystery lover calls it. If the story had been tightened up, the second thing would not have annoyed me nearly as much. What is the second thing? Paloma, the main character herself. Through the first third of the book, I felt bad for Paloma. Her voice is filled with judgment, with profanity, with anger, with fear, with guilt. The judgmental attitude I could overlook to a great extent as well as the profanity. Besides, the way Paloma tells her story really made me want to know what made her so fearful, so angry, so guilty. But these strong emotions went on and on and on. If the book had had more editing to tighten everything up, I would not have had time to either deduce the main plot twist or to become increasingly annoyed with Paloma. But it didn't, and I did.

Yes, I did have some problems with My Sweet Girl, but there's a lot to like about this story that shows us the lengths to which people will go when they are absolutely desperate. On the strength of her plot and Paloma's voice, I'll be keeping an eye peeled for Jayatissa's next book.

(Review copy courtesy of the publisher and Net Galley) ( )