Laura van den Berg: Find Me

[bibliogramma]

Laura van den Berg's debut novel Find Me is an engaging story about memory, forgetting, hope, and the search for identity, set against the sciencefictional background of a mysterious plague (which apparently only affects the United States). Joy, the narrator, is a woman who was abandoned as an infant, grew up in a series of foster and group homes, and is working retail (where she steals cough syrup which she uses as a drug). When the plague strikes, she is contacted by a dying woman who gives her some clues about her birth mother, including a photograph.

Not long afterward she is contacted by an organisation conducting research on the plague. As Joy was exposed to the plague early on but has not developed symptoms, it is possible that she is immune. She agrees to participate in the research, and is taken, with 149 other possible immunes, to an isolated hospital in rural Kansas.

There is an odd, almost dream-like quality to Joy's experiences before, during and after her time in what she refers to as "The Hospital," a quality accentuated by the non-linear narrative. Events seem fraught with symbolism, and the plague is itself a metaphoric sort of apocalypse that reflects Joy's own issues with memory and traumatic amnesia.

Interesting but ultimately unsatisfying, largely because of the author's choice to use sciencefictional tropes but not fully engage with them.