Find Me
Written by Laura van den Berg
Narrated by Emily Woo Zeller
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
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.
Laura van den Berg
Laura van den Berg is the author of the story collections What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, The Isle of Youth, and I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, which was named one the ten best fiction books of 2020 by TIME, and the novels Find Me and The Third Hotel, which was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and named a best book of 2018 by more than a dozen publications. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Strauss Living Award and a Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Bard Fiction Prize, a PEN/O. Henry Award, and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and is a two-time finalist for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award.
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Reviews for Find Me
6 ratings5 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A really good book but not as strong to me as her short stories.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Post apocalyptic coming of age! Take two genres and call me in the morning! I did enjoy this first novel, with some caveats. The US is in dire straits, in the midst of a mysterious plague that starts will silver bruises and ends quickly in complete brain disintegration (a/k/a/Mad Cow). Cities empty and Joy Jones, once a child left on a hospital doorstep in Boston, is brought as a 20 year old to a Kansas hospital with other citizens who seemingly have immunity. Joy discovers the identity of her birth mother and escapes the confines of the hospital to find her. In hospital and during her travels, she meets with all walkers of life and death and recounts her childhood in foster homes and her barely lived former life as a cough syrup addict and third shift cashier at a Stop 'N' Shop. So perhaps dodging a life threatening disease and a meetup with a boy she know in foster care is an improvement. The end - oh the end - completely unsatisfactory for me and a common problem I have found with recent fiction. Let me know if you agree. This is a worthy read for the situation and the character, and the Boston setting.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5It is always a problem when a book is reviewed by so many people and gets a star rating. It is a coming of age book set in a weird time and not very good There are so many more interesting coming of age books. It is pretentious and bad.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Joy is a lonely, troubled young woman. She was abandoned as a baby and still feels adrift. When a sickness begins to spread across the country, killing many, Joy finds herself immune. She is sent to a hospital in Kansas, along with other survivors, to be studied and evaluated. This becomes her family but it also becomes a prison and she begins to question the staff's motivation.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.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This book was pretty good, but it ended rather abruptly. I had a few technical issues with the audiobook, not sure why. I skipped over some parts which involved animals because I can't deal with anything happening to animals. It was a different kind of story and thank goodness no agenda. It was written in 2015 so it was before the "plandemic". Overall not a great story but not too bad it kept me listening.