Description
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.… (more)
Collection
Publication
User reviews
Dystopia has certainly been done to death lately but, like Station Eleven and Bird Box, this author does bring some fresh ideas to the table. Her writing is moody and atmospheric. The problem, is the second half, as Joy escapes the hospital and goes on a quest to find her birth mother, the story begins to ramble and lose focus. I think she is a talented writer and I would love to try her short fiction, but she doesn't quite pull together a complete novel.
It starts with Joy, a young woman living in a hospital. We gradually learn that she's there because she's believed to be immune to a disease that is
This is a beautifully written book that will stay with me. I will definitely read the author's other books.
It starts with Joy, a young woman living in a hospital. We gradually learn that she's there because she's believed to be immune to a disease that is
This is a beautifully written book that will stay with me. I will definitely read the author's other books.
FIND ME is a coming of age story set in the middle of an apocalypse. The epidemic is sweeping the country like a hurricane. All Joy wants is to find her real home, her mother. She has no idea how dangerous or difficult the journey will be.Think Dorothy--another orphan from Kansas--from THE WIZARD OF OZ + ON THE ROAD by Cormac McCarthy.
Author Laura van den Berg asks the reader to consider how we can know who we are without knowing where and who we came from. This is a big question in FIND ME and the fact that the flu erases the victim’s memory before it kills them is significant. Van den Berg makes you feel the intensity of Joy’s emptiness and pain, makes you understand that for Joy the risks she takes aren’t as frightening as never knowing why her mother abandoned her after living with her for one month. Why not right after birth? What awful thing did Joy do to turn her away?
FIND ME is almost unbearably saturated with the negative power of one person’s abandonment and loss. Days after finishing the novel, I am still wondering why the author chose an apocalyptic setting. Intriguing. A stunner of a first novel!
Highly recommended to all readers who like to ponder.
And none of that actually remotely describes this book. Or rather, it describes the book I thought I was reading at the beginning, but there is something odd, something off-kilter about it all that just grows stronger and stronger as the novel goes on, until about halfway through it starts to feel more like a collection of symbols than a story. Now, I have no problem with the surreal and the symbolic, and it's all well-written and kind of interesting, but the longer it went on, the less it felt like the book I wanted it to be, or was hoping in the beginning that it would be, and the less satisfying I found it. And in the end, I'm not even remotely sure just what all those symbols are supposed to add up to.
Rating: This is extremely hard to rate, as I can't say I liked it, but it's not a bad book. It is, rather, a book by someone with obvious talent who is trying to do something artistic that just didn't quite work for me. And I'm not even sure how much of that is the novel itself, and how much is it just being the wrong book at the wrong time for me. But in the end, whatever the reason, I'm dissatisfied enough that I can't bring myself to give it more than a 3/5.
Gritty. Entertaining. Thought-provoking. These are all words I would certainly use to describe this book. There are some great philosophical questions raised here though a very well-written and developed story. What makes us who we are? What defines humanity? What is ethical when it comes to medical treatment, and when is it appropriate to set those ethics aside for what is perceived to be the best interest of the patient or the broader population? Do all social experiments wind up going terribly wrong? Even with these questions on the forefront, there's nothing preachy--the author doesn't dictate the answers, rather she gives us scenarios to consider as we, the readers, make up our own minds.
This book was so weird to read. It didn't really go anywhere.