Unreliable Identity in “My Sweet Girl”

I got My Sweet Girl, by Amanda Jayatissa, because I just loved You’re Invited. This is one of the times I’m glad not to do a stars review, because this book contained some really thoughtful scenes, a well-done twist, and a couple of total eyeroll moments too.

We have a dual-timeline thriller, where one timeline is about young girls in a Sri Lankan orphanage, where something shady and sinister is definitely going on behind the scenes. The girls scare each other with ghost stories, but even if the ghosts are just stories, something’s walking the grounds at night…  The other timeline is about one of the girls adopted from that orphanage by wealthy American  philanthropists. Paloma is thirty, struggling as a graphic designer (sort of), and trying to make it without her parents’ money. She continues to have nightmares about the ghost, and self-medicate with booze and prescription meds.

There’s a bit of the Unspeakable Secret Plot Device here, as Paloma’s being blackmailed by her roommate, who found a letter containing Paloma’s dark, unexplained secret. (Now that I’ve read the whole book, I’m not entirely sure who he was planning to tell, or what he was planning to do with the information. She had the letter back, and it’s not like he was going to tell her parents, and the home in Sri Lanka had long closed, so…???) But anyway, blackmail is still a really compelling motivation and a great hook! Plus, after she tries to get the money together, the would-be blackmailer turns up dead. It takes a long, long time to  find out Paloma’s huge secret, but that’s such a wild opening, I was pretty much sold.

My Sweet Girl had a lot to enjoy, but it also had my least favorite kind of unreliable narrator. I like a bit of an unreliable narrator, especially when we get their incorrect suspicions or explanations about what could be happening, and readers have to figure out what the truth is.  Quiet in Her Bones, by Nalini Singh, has a narrator who needs heavy painkillers after an accident, and there’s a lot of tension from figuring out if his memories can be trusted. In The Witch Elm, by Tana French, the protag is also recovering from injuries and spends some of the narrative in a bit of a mental fog, so readers are wondering if there’s something he’s missing. A thriller protag who might be missing something crucial makes a great story, and there’s a bit of that here in My Sweet Girl.

But I don’t like a straight-up lying narrator, because it feels cheap when too much of the reveal hinges on “oh that part? that was all fake!” So this went a little too far for me, from vague or incomplete information into disinformation.

In addition to the thriller aspect, there’s a lot about transracial adoption and ethnic identity. A bit like in Chinese-American Ivy in White Ivy, Sri Lankan-Americans in My Sweet Girl finds themselves judged on appearance, all the time. Sometimes this is beneficial (obviously a  sweet model-minority’s not up to anything sinister!) but usually it’s just awkward. I had a couple cringes at realistically awkward moments.

The big reveal is foreshadowed enough that I considered it might be possible, rejected it as just too big, considered it again a few pages later, rejected it again, for ages and ages. This is my absolute favorite way to read a thriller… enough hints to guess at the ending, without feeling like it’s too obvious and the characters are too slow to catch on.

What to read next for similar vibes:

The Majesties, by Tiffany Tsao, for a dramatic story about the daughter of a wealthy Indo-Chinese family, full of with privilege, dark secrets, and a not-entirely-reliable narrator.  Social Creature, by Tara Isabella Burton, for a tensely thoughtful story of Manhattan social climbing, identity, and privilege. The Night Tiger, by Yangsze Choo, for an entirely different story, but the same strange wonder that a terrifying mythical creature might actually exist. The Hunting Party, by Lucy Foley, also uses the haves and have-nots for a dramatic thriller, but it’s more of a locked-room mystery.