Find Me

Written by Laura van den Berg

Narrated by Emily Woo Zeller

Things I will never forget: my name, my made-up birthday…The dark of the Hospital at night. My mother's face, when she was young.

Things other people will forget: where they come from, how old they are, the faces of the people they love. The right words for bowl and sunshine…What is a beginning and what is an end.

Joy spends her days working the graveyard shift at a store outside Boston and nursing an addiction to cough syrup, an attempt to suppress her troubled past. But when a sickness that begins with silver blisters and 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.

At once a hauntingly beautiful portrayal of a dystopian future and a powerful exploration of loneliness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House UK Audio
• Release date: Jun 4, 2015
• ISBN: 9781473528772

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.

Reviews for Find Me

[bragan_8 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Joy was abandoned as an infant. As a 19-year-old, she works the graveyard shift at an all-night grocery store, until the United States is swept up in a plague whose most terrifying symptom is memory loss. She appears to be immune, and is taken to a place she knows only as "the Hospital," where she discovers something about her mother and begins to dream of finding her again.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.

[dougcornelius_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I didn't enjoy this book as much as I expected. It's surreal, dark and wandering. The writing is solid and full of love of the protagonist, Joy.

[othemts · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This novel is the story of a young woman named Joy, an orphan raised in various foster homes, who becomes a test subject in a remote hospital when she is found to be immune to a deadly disease sweeping the United States. The disease has the effect of causing people to lose their memories and the book uses the disease to symbolically explore memory and identity. Joy's first person narrative switches between flashbacks to her life as a foster child and the increasing despair of living in the prison-like hospital with people dying around her. About 2/3's of the way of the novel Joy escapes and ventures out to try to find her birth mother (this is written on the dust jacket so it's not really a spoiler). From this point on it feels like a lot of the characters are there just to serve a symbolic role in Joy's life rather than seeming like realistic characters. I'll say this is an interesting premise and mostly engrossing book with an unsatisfying ending.

[lazybee_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Find Me is a beautifully written novel. It's characters are completely real and believable, but the book has a dreamy, fairy tale-like feeling. 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 devastating the US. But a plot summary is kind of misleading, because Find Me isn't about the epidemic, it's about Joy as she decides what kind of person she wants to be and how to incorporate her past into herself. This is a beautifully written book that will stay with me. I will definitely read the author's other books.

[enidav-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

If I could rate each half of this book separately I'd give the first half 4 stars for it's originality and beautiful writing and the second half 1 star for its pointless and illogical rambling. Right from the beginning of Part 2 I knew that Van den Berg had chosen style over substance when a snake slithers out of a bloated corpse. In the middle of winter. I guess it makes a nice word-picture but I've never heard of snakes eating dead people - and don't they hibernate? And why has a disease that has killed only 400,000 people in a country of over 300 million made society so dysfunctional? It's ridiculous! The Spanish Influenza of 1918 killed over 600,000 out of a population of 100 million and the U.S. got along just fine during and after the epidemic. If the story had been gripping maybe these things wouldn't bother me so much. But in Part 2 all the main character really does is wander around.It's like Van den Berg figured that since she wrote so well, she didn't need to bother with whether things made sense. She does write well - I wanted to read this book because I was amazed by one of her brilliant short stories. But this book is a mess. So disappointing!

[froxgirl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Post 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.

[msf59 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Joy 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.

[viviennestrauss · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A really good book but not as strong to me as her short stories.

[citizenjoyce · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Written 5 years ago, this book gives an eerily accurate portrayal of life during a pandemic. The disease this time is a kind of Alzheimer's on steroids. Mixed in is a description of relationships and mother-child rejection. It hasn't been rated well, but I would think with recent events people might want to revise their number of stars.

[julie10reads · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In the imminent future, Joy Jones is immune to the brain dissolving flu that is decimating the American population. She has been recruited for a clinical study at a hospital in Kansas dedicated entirely to monitoring those apparently immune or in a latent state in an effort to find a cure.The chilling scenes with the strange Norwegian Doctor Bek play out with cinematic detail. The narration of Joy’s sterile daily routine at the hospital is interrupted by flashbacks of her previous life clerking in a convenience store, self-medicating with Benylin to ease her loneliness, and childhood stints in several foster homes. Orphaned at one month, Joy’s mother left her in the cold on the steps of hospital. When baby Joy was discovered, frostbite was just setting into her tiny nose and fingers. Her heart was damaged too: there was a huge mother-shaped hole right in the middle. Adult Joy doesn’t really care that she is immune. Tracking down her birth mother is the only goal worth living for. Joy and another patient venture out into the devastated landscape.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.

[shazjhb · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

It 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.