They Called Me Wyatt Review

I received an eARC of this book from NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

I loved the premise of this story. It was what made me so excited to picked this book up in the first place. I haven't seen a ton of racial diversity in mysteries, so it was nice to see that this was what appears to be an #ownvoices book, as the girl who was murdered is from Jordan and the author is Jordanian-American.

The story itself was interesting. I was engaged from the first page of the story. The main thing that bothered me was that this book definitely needs a good edit. There were multiple mistakes that would be remedied with a good edit, from punctuation to some minor grammatical errors.

I did like that, during the first part of the book, it was all from Siwar's point of view as she tried to navigate things in the body of a three year old boy. You caught the tiniest of glimpses of what went through her mind whenever the diaper had to be changed on Wyatt's body and how she dealt with having a penis all of a sudden when she hadn't had much interaction with one in her own life prior to her murder. You could also see the struggle of having to learn out to navigate this three year old body when her 25 year old self says, "I know how to do this!" Especially since at the age of three, Wyatt is speech delayed and she can't use his voice to explain what had happened to her.

During part two, the voices of Wyatt and Siwar were just different enough to be noticeable. There were parts that felt like that they were on the similar side. But after cohabiting in someone else's mind, I can easily forgive that part. Even with living with someone for that long, you tend to pick up at least one habit of the other person. And since Siwar had nothing but her consciousness, I could easily get past that.

Towards the end, there was a conversation that Wyatt had with his friend Adam over the phone that felt a bit forced. The things that were said didn't quite flow naturally. I cringed a bit reading that specific bit of the story.

When we got to the end of the story where we find out who actually committed the murder, I was hoping that it wouldn't be a cop out. The story took a bit of a turn before we found out and, for the most part, I wasn't super surprised at who the murderer was. It did, however, make sense that the murderer was who it was.

Rating: Ignoring the punctuation mistakes: 3.5/5 stars Not ignoring the punctuation mistakes: 2.75/5 stars