The Girl She Used to Be by David Cristofano
My rating: 
(3 / 5)
“Name me. Gaze into my eyes, study my smile and dimples and tell me what you see. I look like an Emma. I look like an Amy. I look like a Katherine. I look like a Kathryn. I look like your best friend’s sister, your sister’s best friend. Introduce me. Yell for me. Let me run away and call me back. Run your fingers through my hair and whisper my name.
Call me whatever you want; it’s just a name, after all.”
When Melody was six years old, she lost her identity, her safety, her life. When Melody was six years old, she begged her parents to take her out for breakfast, and when they did, her parents happened down an alley, little girl in tow, and witnessed a mob hit.
Since then, she’s been in witness protection, moving from place to place now just because she gets bored, sometimes. Just because she can. Just because it’s easier to start over than face the reality that she can’t ever get attached, can’t ever make a real friend, can’t ever fall in love.
When a new federal marshall takes over her case, Melody sees something in him that she hasn’t seen in a man before, the way he looks at her tells her more than she expected. Maybe, for once, she’s found something she can hang onto.
This is a decently written chicklit style romance, with enough of a mystery to keep me intrigued. It’s sad and quite a lonely book, tugged at my emotions (sometimes gratuitously, sometimes very authentically). I only gave it three stars, because it really had the potential to be so much more than it is, and I was left a little flat in some parts that should have been really terrific. It’s as though the author could walk up to moments of huge emotion, could see them, could almost touch them, but couldn’t quite involve himself enough in them to write them.
This was a very quick read, and would be a good vacation/airplane novel.
You know, entertaining enough to keep you distracted, not deep enough that all the other stuff going on takes away from the experience or makes you lose pace in the book.