Super enjoyable thriller!
Paloma is an adopted Sri Lankan living in San Francisco and battling a drinking problem. Recently cut off from her parents financially, Paloma is struggling to make ends meet with her dead end job and a questionable roommate.
Very early on, her roommate disappears after discovering her biggest secret. Paloma can't determine if her drinking is fooling her or if there are darker forces at work related to her past at the orphanage and her secret.

In this novel you do not know whom to trust and whom to root for. Totally twisty and believable, My Sweet Girl will keep you reading late in to the night to find out what is going on. People and bodies disappear, possible ghosts and stalkers appear and reappear and the entire time you are unsure of whether you can believe the narrator.

Great novel, enjoyed learning a bit about Sri Lanka and discovering the final twists at the end, At times, there was an opportunity to tension and fear that I think was missed. Still a great novel that kept me thoroughly engaged until the very end.

If you like thrillers, mysteries, unreliable narrators, deep secrets and anything about Sri Lanka this will pull you right in! Thank you to @NetGalley and #BerkleyBooks and the author Amanda Jayalissa for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Thanks NetGalley for sending me a copy of this book in exchange for a review.

Good but not spectacular. Paloma, the protagonist completely sucked. It was impossible to really root for her for most of the book because she was just such a butt hole. The story was told in alternating timelines (past/present) and it guess it suited the plot twist towards the end, but the past kinda dragged. It was pretty boring until it wasn't. And it didn't take too long for me to guess how it would end. Overall, a solid debut but nothing i would go out of my way to recommend at all

A woman adopted as a young teen in Sri Lanka by an American couple must confront her past before its too late. Paloma is going to do what needs to be done when her roommate decides to blackmail her when he finds an incriminating letter about her past. But while she's at the bank getting him money, she returns to find him dead. She understandably freaks out, and runs out only to return later to find the body gone. Meanwhile, she's having the feeling a ghost is haunting her, an elderly friend goes missing, and a mysterious man keeps hounding her. How does everything link to her past? What is she hiding? And who would kill for it?

Told in alternating chapters between now and her past in Sri Lanka, the reader gradually finds out what happened to Paloma and await the final showdown - which is more than a bit shocking. This was a great mystery thriller and would make a cool movie.

My Sweet Girl, by Amanda Jayatissa, is one part thriller, two parts suspense, three parts searing commentary on race and wealth, and all parts brilliant.

First, half of the thriller is set in a Sri Lankan orphanage, where pre-adolescent girls are used as props by the adults around them to entice the sympathies of well-to-do Americans. Jayatissa nails the hypocrisy and desperation of everyone involved in the farce, the half-magical half-bitter secret lives of the girls and covers it all in a blanket of eerie tension and sickening foreboding.

The other half is set in current day San Francisco. Jayatissa perfectly captures the cadence of millennials in the city, the casual racism and microaggressions that women of color face even in a city that prides itself in its progressiveness, and the inner thoughts of her tortured and unlikable main character, Paloma.

Paloma is an uncomfortable vessel for a chilling tale and the reader is constantly unsettled by her¬– even when she is bitingly funny. Every time you are tempted into sympathy for her, she bats it away with an uncanny talent for self-sabotage. The ending, when it clubs you from behind, is a master stroke and leaves you reeling for days afterward.

This book blew me away with its seemingly effortless combination of thriller and social commentary and you will be missing an important reading experience if you don’t pick it up.

This book surprised me!

A huge thank you to Berkley Pub, NetGalley and the author for my advanced copy.

What I Enjoyed-

The Dual Timeline- Not uncommon in books but it never gets old for me. Love a good Dual Timeline.

The Setting- Part of this book is set in Sri Lanka. I had never read a book set there until now.

The Creepiness- This book had great atmosphere. My Sweet Girl features some Sri Lankan folklore. Mohini was so scary. At different points I asked myself is this mystery thriller or is this horror ? 🤣. I'm a big chicken. Mohini is like the equivalent of what Bloody Mary was for me as a child. Oh the nightmares!

The Twists- Did not see them coming.

The Ending- Fabulous. This book was coasting between a 3 to a 3 ½ Star . The end definitely contributed to the higher rating.

Why It Lost a Star-

Paloma- So unlikeable. This usually does not bother me in mystery thriller books. Paloma was over the top annoying in the present day timeline.

The Language- We're all adults and sometimes adults use language. I get it. It was just excessive and The author often repeats the phrase "what the actual F*ck". If I were reading a physical copy I might have thrown it across the room.

Overall- So thankful to have been granted an early copy. I look forward to checking out more from this author in the future and I encourage other readers to pick this book .

Through a series of flashbacks, readers learn the story behind Paloma's adoption from a Sri Lankan orphanage for girls when she was twelve. She was fortunate to be reading Mrs. Evan's favorite book when she and her husband toured the orphanage and Mrs. Evans took an immediate liking to her. Little did Mrs. Evans know that the book that Paloma was reading belonged to her best friend at the orphanage who had the book memorized. Did the Evans' adopt the wrong girl? Now grown, Paloma has difficulty adjusting to her life in the US, binging on alcohol and mixing it with drugs prescribed by her analyst. Why is she being so self-destructive? Is she feeling guilty for leaving her best friend behind in the orphanage? As her past is revealed, readers begin to realize that something doesn't quite add up in Paloma's adoption story and people who know the truth have died. Jayatissa writes Paloma's story as if we were experiencing it first hand and readers will find themselves wondering how something as cherished as an adopted child can go so terribly wrong.

Paloma is in shock when she comes home to her roommate Arun dead at the table. By the time she comes to and the cops arrive, the body is gone. While she had been worried that he knew her secret, she never would have killed him. Who did though? And what happened to his body? Suddenly strange things are happening to her but nobody believes her. Is her past secret finally catching up with her?

It took me some time to get into this one, but once I did I needed to know more. I just wanted to know what Paloma had done in her past that was so bad! I definitely figured out what was happening before I normally do in thrillers, but that didn’t stop me for quickly turning the pages! I really enjoyed the current day story line, but also switching back to the past in Sri Lanka at the orphanage. I think Jayatissa did a great job with telling both stories and weaving them together in a very well done way. The only downside is now “Que Sera” is stuck in my head for the next few days!

2.5 stars

I had high hopes for this based on the summary and other reviews, but it missed the mark for me. It did transition smoothly from past to present, but too many plot points were predictable and the pace was a bit slow for this genre. It also felt like the author was unsure of the genre and if it should be a thriller, paranormal, etc.

After seeing all the 5 star reviews for this book, I was excited to get my hands on an advanced readers copy! However, I ended up being in that small group of readers who were less than thrilled with this book and somewhat disappointed. Special thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free electronic ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review.
Basically, this dark and twisty thriller centers on Paloma who lives in Sri Lanka in an orphanage until she is adopted by a very wealthy American couple and moves to America. The story flip flops between present day and her days that she spent living in the orphanage in Sri Lanka. Present day Paloma is keeping a very big secret from everyone. After discovering her secret and trying to blackmail her, Paloma’s roommate ends up dead and then the body goes missing and thus starts the beginning of the many twists and turns that the plot takes. Paloma herself is a deeply flawed character with psychological issues and the reader waivers between feeling sympathetic towards as well as extreme dislike. Many of the plot twists are a total surprise while others I was able to figure out on my own. This story requires the reader to pay very close attention to detail as I found it to become quite confusing at times and hard to follow the plot. The ending was one big ball of confusion for me and I actually had to go back a few times and reread sections in order to understand what was happening. Given that so many people rated this book so highly, it’s very possible that it was entirely me that had issues with the story and not the story itself.

This book is my most favorite read of 2021 so far, and that’s extremely unexpected because it wasn’t even one of my most anticipated reads.

Paloma has a secret. And her nosy roommate had to go snooping. Arun attempts to extort Paloma to keep her secret, but she finds him in a pool of his own blood later that night. When the body mysteriously disappears and her apartment is cleaned, Paloma starts to spiral.

Is her childhood ghost Mohini back to haunt her, or is something more sinister afoot?

Feeling like she can’t trust anyone, Paloma tries to figure things out on her own, but that just causes her more problems, until it all blows up in her face, after 18 years of hiding the truth.

Jayatissa enters the book world with a bang. As many of you know, I’m a guesser when it comes to mysteries. Jayatissa had me flip-flopping like a fish. Her writing style is very distinctive, and when you think you know what’s going on she flips it. It channels The Bell Jar in the sense that you spiral with Paloma and understand her point of view. But at the same time, the chapters from Sri Lanka serve to ground you again and again. Each chapter has a distinctive voice.

While at it’s core, My Sweet Girl is a mystery: What is Paloma’s secret? What happened to Arun? What about Paloma’s mysterious past? However, in between the lines is a supernatural ghost story. They don’t seem to go hand-in-hand, but Jayatissa blends them beautifully. Expertly. I found myself scared, the only light from my iPad as I raced through the pages. I yelped when my cat jumped on the bed, scaring us both. That’s not to say anything terribly gory happens; this isn’t Saw. Jayatissa just knows how to build up suspense to a point where it all just boils over. The answers are not readily given, but they are oh-so satisfying when you get them, regardless of if you saw it coming or not.

I have a love-hate relationship with Paloma. She’s essentially the only character aside from some side characters. In the California chapters, there’s Sam, one if Arun’s friends and another Sri Lankan. Was he involved with Arun’s murder? Does he know Paloma’s secret. She gets close to him to try and figure into just how much he knows about her. Conversely, the Sri Lanka chapters follow Paloma and her friend Lahini, both girls born into the orphanage. Lahini has a growing obsession with Mohini and this, plus Paloma’s impending adoption, are driving them apart. I can’t say I love the characters, but I love how honest (ironically) they all are. They’re all out of place in someway, but they don’t just sit back and take it. Paloma is rather aggressive, temperamental, an unreliable, but that just makes the story all the better. As far as unreliable narrators go, Paloma works really hard to convince you she’s not crazy, and someone, or something, is after her.

I can’t wait for this book to come out so I can reread it and track all the clues and hints.

A dark and twisty debut! This is the story of Paloma, an anti-heroine of sorts who grew up in an orphanage in Sri Lanka and was adopted by an American couple from California. As the plot begins, thirty-year-old Paloma is at wits end: she no longer receives money from her parents and she finds her roommate Arun dead in her apartment. However, before the police arrive to investigate, Arun’s body and all signs of his death have disappeared.

Paloma’s story is told in chapters alternating between Paloma in Sri Lanka twenty years ago and present day San Francisco. While this story is definitely well-written, the suspense that builds as it progresses is very, very slow going. And, although there are twists and turns along the way, the ending — which was somewhat but not completely a surprise to me — left quite a few unanswered questions.

All in all, though, I found this an interesting read, especially for an author’s first novel. It has been receiving great reviews, so I may be an outlier. I look forward to her next.

4.5/5 This was an extremely fun thriller to read with just enough going on to keep me guessing, but not too much to bog down the story. The story alternates between past and present with one of those characters being somewhat unreliable. I was able to deduce early on that there was one of two things happening, but it wasn't until the reveal at the end that everything fell into place. Overall, a very satisfying read.

One of the best thrillers I've read in a long time! I loved both storylines. The writing was fabulous, the voice captivating, and while I could put some things together, I still was surprised by the ending! Great balance all around. Can't wait for this author's next book!

Oh man..... unfortunately this was a complete dud for me. I'm not even sure where to start?

This book was all over the place. I couldn't tell if I was reading a suspense, drama, or thriller? The story is told from two different timelines one in California and the other 18 years ago in Sri Lanka. One timeline is reading exactly like a slow and boring YA novel and the other is timeline is just as slow.

There was something about Paloma that just rubbed me the wrong way. I was annoyed with her from the beginning. Too many plot holes in the story line and that twist?! You've got to be kidding me. I wouldn't even call that a twist.

I've been seeing so many glowing reviews and once again I have become an outlier on my lonely island haha.

I can't say I really enjoyed this one at all.

1.5/5 stars

Thank you so much to Berkley and netgalley for the arc in exchange for an honest review.

Pub date: 9/14/21
Published to GR: 7/4/21

This is such a hard book to review without giving away the twists. But oh, the twists! I loved them. Other things I loved - Paloma's voice and attitude. The flashbacks between the present in CA and the past in Sri Lanka. The way Jayatissa used little details to paint such a vivid picture of Paloma's surroundings, wherever she was. The way the clues dropped and slowly revealed themselves so that when a twist fully unfolded, you had to smack yourself for not seeing it. Amazing!

I went into this book expecting a psychological thriller and got SO much more. Paloma is an unreliable narrator with a strong, unique voice that grabs you by the collar from page one. It's so refreshing to see a female character who the author allows to be foul-mouthed and brash--traits that are usually reserved for white men who somehow get away with bad behavior. I loved waiting to see what Paloma would do and say next; she was constantly keeping me guessing. I really enjoyed how the story was told in a dual narrative, with Paloma in present day alternating with her younger self as an orphan in Sri Lanka. This format really helped to build the tension and continue to raise new questions that I just had to know the answer to. The author plays with ghost stories and the supernatural in such a fresh and exciting way that made the twist ending all the more jaw-dropping, and SPOOKY. This was truly one of the most unique thrillers I have read and I look forward to seeing what the author does next.

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.

A solid thriller with many plot twists ( many were predictable, and i guessed a lot of them) and an unreliable narrator. I enjoyed this book even though the plot twists were predictable at times.

This twisted tale of Paloma and her childhood friend Lihini, is told through flashbacks and real time, alternating between San Francisco and Sri Lanka. Paloma tells her what should have been a heart warming success story of being adopted from a Sri Lankan orphanage.. Rather we encounter a tale no less than a horror story. The orphan girl was 12 years old and moved to America to start a new life with her new parents. This most wonderful event was bitter sweet as it meant leaving behind her best friend.

Now with a new life in the land of opportunity, and the best of everything, she spent the next 18 years terrified of Mohini. Mohini was a being. One she thought she had actually and physically seen in Sri Lanka. Nevertheless, Mohina was a terrifying presence. Her therapist had spent years telling her Mohini didn’t exist, rather she was just the result of an overactive mind.
Then Paloma discovers her roommate’s lifeless body in the kitchen of their apartment. This drama brings about Mohini’s reappearance. Unfortunately, Paloma’s reality is clouded by numerous bouts of drunkenness. On top, of all this, another person close to her disappears leaving Paloma wondering if Mohini is stalking her life. You see, she has a very deep and dark sinister secret that followed her and has haunted her for what she’d done 18 years ago in Sri Lanka. And... they say, Mohini never forgets.

The suspense in this tale was fast paced and, as Paloma remembered her years in the orphanage, the things that were now happening to her began to make sense of her past. The deep secret when finally unveiled, did give this reader quite a shock and satisfaction that I didn’t see it coming.

Read carefully as you don’t want to miss any detail. This new to me author, Jayatissa, has quite the cunning writing talent to lead her readers on. Yes, this one is a must read.

Thank you Amanda Jayatissa for this excellent book and thank you Netgally for granting me access to the ARC.

Highly recommended!

Welcome to the Sweet and Sour Cafe, located in the heart of Outlier Land! While reviews are just starting to come in for Amanda Jayatissa’s debut thriller, My Sweet Girl, anything less than a 5-star take on it is out of the norm. Why am I only at 3 stars then?

The Sweet

- The writing is brash, in-your-face, and unapologetic. Jayatissa has created a main character who’s first person perspective is unfiltered and fresh. You can tell from the very first sentence if it will work for you or not. “There’s a special place in hell for incompetent customer service agents, and it’s right between monsters who stick their bare feet up on airplane seats and mansplainers.”

- Chapters alternate between present-day San Francisco and Sri Lanka 20 years ago. I enjoyed learning a little about the latter location, since I don’t think I’ve read a book set there before.

- Jayatissa is from Sri Lanka herself, making this an #ownvoices story.

The Sour

- Paloma, the mc, is such an unreliable narrator that after awhile it was like listening to someone you know to be a habitual liar. What’s the point?

- Which lead me to getting a little bored and looking forward to getting to the ending.

- Which wrapped things up The Lamest Way Possible (see my Goodreads profile bio for definition/spoiler).

- Which revealed many twists, most that I had guessed.

- Which lead me to dreading and putting off writing this review, which is never a good sign.

But as I said, I’m the outlier, so read the praise for this novel before crossing it off your list! You just might find My Sweet Girl to be much sweeter than I did.

My thanks to Berkley Publishing Group for providing me with an advance copy to review. The expected US publication date is September 14th, 2021.