I was very excited to read Beside Myself. The description sounded incredibly thrilling and interesting, so I put in my NetGalley request, crossing my fingers that I'd get a chance to read this book. 
 Now that I've read it, I have to say I'm kind of disappointed. I really thought I was going to love it, but in all honesty I had a hard time reading this book. It took me a while to get into the flip flop chapters that take place in third person in the present day and first person (kind of? It's more of a "you" instead of "I" perspective) in the past. The author gives so much description that I found myself skimming pages until I got to more of the actual plot. I do think the idea for this book was really cool and the author did a good job showing how Smudge (and even Hellie) was totally messed up by the switch. I was expecting more from the twist at the end, like for them to explain what (view spoiler)[caused their father to commit suicide (hide spoiler)], or what really happened between (view spoiler)[their mother and her uncle. Because they brought up these topics I thought they were going to be important to the storyline like maybe their mother killed their father, or their mother's uncle was really their father, but they ended up being random plot lines that didn't add that much in my opinion (hide spoiler)]. In fact the final twist at the end (view spoiler)[where it turns out their mother knew they had switched almost the whole time (hide spoiler)] just made me really mad. She basically (view spoiler)[ruined her daughters life just so that she wouldn't be wrong. She thought they wouldn't notice after a while which just goes to show you how much their mother didn't care and didn't see them as individual people. She let her daughter feel crazy and basically go crazy when she knew the truth all along (hide spoiler)]. 
 I will say that going into this book I thought it was a young adult read and it wasn't, so I did appreciate that, while there was some adult content, it wasn't very graphic. The author alluded to more things, which I thought worked well because there were a lot of touchy subjects. 
 The one thing that doesn't make any sense to me in this story though is that I don't understand how no one could realize the switch and fix it in all those years. I would imagine even just a simple trip to the doctors office for blood work would have solved all of this, and that's something routine that people need to get done anyway. Adding insult to injury -- (view spoiler)[Smudge got arrested and spent time in an institution, and Hellie was in a freaking coma!!! How was it that in all these situations no police/doctors realized the finger prints or blood work or records didn't match (hide spoiler)]! That just didn't make sense to me at all. 
 I have received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. 
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