The Girl I Used to Be

February 29, 2016
New evidence makes a teenager rethink everything she knows about her mother’s murder in Henry’s (Blood Will Tell) underwhelming thriller. At age three, Ariel Benson was the only witness to her mother’s stabbing, a crime everyone believed Ariel’s father committed, before he disappeared. Left in a Walmart hundreds of miles from the crime scene, Ariel bounced around the foster care system and, thanks to a failed adoption, became Olivia Reinhart, and an emancipated minor by 17. Olivia is working a dead-end job in Portland, Ore., when the cops arrive to tell her they have found her father’s remains in the same woods where her mother died, leading them to believe the couple died at the same time. Olivia launches her own unofficial investigation and heads to the small Oregon town of Medford, where every old acquaintance of her parents could be a killer. Predictably, there’s a cute and helpful boy, a slow unpacking of dormant memories, and a shoal of red herrings, but dry narration and underdeveloped characters do little to elevate this whodunit. Ages 12–up. Agent: Wendy Schmalz, Wendy Schmalz Agency.

Narrator Amy McFadden makes listeners shiver from the very start of this eerie exploration of a family murder. She captures the angst of teenage girls, particularly Olivia, whose mother is murdered when she is in high school. McFadden's voice is spooky, an effect of her slightly raspy timbre. The danger is palpable from the graduation party, with its underage drinking, to the moment Olivia realizes that someone else, not her father, killed her mother. Listeners will want to hear this on road trips or long flights in order to cram in as many chapters as possible in one sitting. M.R. � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine