Laura van den Berg - Find Me

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Atmospheric and very well written, but...

I have struggled to give this book a rating. Some things about it are excellent but in the end I wasn't really sure what it added up to. I didn't think its content really warranted four stars, but three stars seems churlish for such an atmospheric and well written book so I have rounded 3.5 stars up to four. Just.

The story is set in a near future in which a memory-destroying disease has swept across the USA and disrupted lives and much of society. The narrator is Joy, a 20-year-old woman who has grown up in institutions and foster-care and whose life is unstable and chaotic. The story opens with her in an isolation hospital for those immune to the disease, and in the second half turns into a road-trip through the USA on a quest. (It might be too much of a spoiler to say what the quest is in search of.) Joy's narrative voice is excellently done; it has a flat, unemotional but extremely haunting quality about it and an absorbing, almost hypnotic rhythm at times. It is a tour de force of writing ability, I think, and it kept me reading throughout in spite of my reservations about the book.

Those reservations are about the content, or rather the possible lack of content. This is really a book about alienation and the nature of memory. The alienation is excellently conveyed in Joy's voice and experience, but I'm not sure it had that much to say otherwise. I kept reading, expecting some insights into memory or how extreme experiences affect our perceptions, perhaps, but I'm not sure there really was much. There's plenty of claustrophobic, almost hallucinogenic atmosphere and a good sense of not knowing what is true and what is not, but I finished the book with a sense of not really knowing what all that had been about. I don't mind the unresolved stories and unexplained events at all, and I certainly didn't want everything neatly explained and tied up, but I'm afraid I didn't quite see the point of it all.

Others feel differently about this book, and have found insight and depth in it. I didn't; I found a haunting, engrossing narrative voice and a powerful atmosphere created by a very talented writer, but I didn't find all that much else.

Don't let me put you off reading this. It's very well written and realised and you may find more in it than I did, but I can only give it qualified recommendation.