After two acclaimed story collections, Laura van den Berg brings us Find Me, her highly anticipated debut novel—a gripping, imaginative, darkly funny tale of a young woman struggling to find her place in the world.
Joy has no one. She spends her days working the graveyard shift at a grocery store outside Boston and nursing an addiction to cough syrup, an attempt to suppress her troubled past. But when a sickness that begins with memory loss and ends with death sweeps the country, Joy, for the first time in her life, seems to have an advantage: she is immune. When Joy’s immunity gains her admittance to a hospital in rural Kansas, she sees a chance to escape her bleak existence. There she submits to peculiar treatments and follows seemingly arbitrary rules, forming cautious bonds with other patients—including her roommate, whom she turns to in the night for comfort, and twin boys who are digging a secret tunnel.
As winter descends, the hospital’s fragile order breaks down and Joy breaks free, embarking on a journey from Kansas to Florida, where she believes she can find her birth mother, the woman who abandoned her as a child. On the road in a devastated America, she encounters mysterious companions, cities turned strange, and one very eerie house. As Joy closes in on Florida, she must confront her own damaged memory and the secrets she has been keeping from herself.
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4
bennettgavrish
(Grade: D) The early chapters of this novel do some metaphysical poking at concepts like isolation, memory, and identity. But then the author tries to do everything at once: go big yet small, broad yet narrow, zombies but with a touch of Oliver Twist. The story goes nowhere, quite literally, in the first half of the book as the narrator is trapped in a hospital that she views as a prison even though it seems like a swell place to be in an apocalypse. Mixing sci-fi with literary fiction is a dangerous art.
(Grade: D) The early chapters of this novel do some metaphysical poking at concepts like isolation, memory, and identity. But then the author tries to do everything at once: go big yet small, broad yet narrow, zombies but with a touch of Oliver Twist. The story goes nowhere, quite literally, in the first half of the book as the narrator is trapped in a hospital that she views as a prison even though it seems like a swell place to be in an apocalypse. Mixing sci-fi with literary fiction is a dangerous art.(Rated on Dec 2, 2017)
1
RemusLupin
(Grade: B) This book was intriguing, with a narrative style evocative of the handmaid's tale. The narrator was unlikeable while still being relatable, and the world-building was believable. However the pacing was inconsistent - the first half was slow to get into, but i raced through the final third of the story unable to set the book down.
Overally a worthy addition to the apocalyptic genre.
(Grade: B) This book was intriguing, with a narrative style evocative of the handmaid's tale. The narrator was unlikeable while still being relatable, and the world-building was believable. However the pacing was inconsistent - the first half was slow to get into, but i raced through the final third of the story unable to set the book down.
Overally a worthy addition to the apocalyptic genre.(Rated on Oct 21, 2016)