Title: American Girl
Author: Wendy Walker
Genre: Mysteries
Number of Pages: 246
Rating: C+
Recommended?: No
Not to be confused with the popular doll franchise, American Girl is a mystery/thriller about a young autistic woman whose life spins out of control when her cruel boss gets murdered. Charlie is seventeen and works at a sandwich shop, sort of like Subway, I guess. She lives in a small nothing town with her mom, stepfather, and half-brothers. It’s abundantly clear that her mom married her stepfather for his money, in order to have an easier life.
Charlie is the product of an affair her mom had with her teacher when she was in high school. All her life Charlie has been taught by her mom to be wary of men and avoid having her life ruined by getting pregnant at all costs. Charlie is determined to get out of her small town when she graduates from high school. She falls in love with Ian, a former classmate who became a cop determined to solve his dad’s hit-and-run death but is afraid of their relationship getting in the way of her freedom.
One night Charlie’s boss Cooper gets murdered while she’s in the restaurant. She knows any number of people had reason to kill the vile man but keeps quiet in order to protect her friends. When she steals Cooper’s phone and a piece of paper with coordinates to a hidden safe, she’s pursued by criminals and must use her wits and ingenuity in order to survive.
Okay. I don’t want to go into any spoilers, but I found this book fairly predictable. There was one event that was brought up early on and I connected the dots on it pretty quickly. It wasn’t rocket science, and this is coming from someone who doesn’t read many mysteries and never figures out this kind of stuff.
The plot was okay. It kept my attention but I felt like it could have been so much more. Charle’s autism didn’t play much of a role in the story, which I found weird. She did a consistently great job of reading peoples’ emotions and facial expressions and acting accordingly, which autistic people are usually not so good at (coming from someone on the autism spectrum, even though obviously there’s a lot of variety.)
Aside from the descriptions of Charlie stimming and the book telling us she was neurodivergent; I never really got a sense of it. For narrative purposes, she didn’t really need the diagnosis at all. Since I was reading this for the autism rep, this was disappointing.
The characters were also largely all good or all bad, lacking the grayness I prefer in mysteries and thrillers (and fiction in general.) The author also seemed to downplay the abusive behavior of the one of the only truly morally gray characters (Charlie’s mother.) American Girl is not a bad book by any means and might appeal to some, but it didn’t fill me with an interest in Wendy Walker’s other work.
Sarah's Corner 