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Find Me by Laura van den Berg – Review

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FindMeThis novel follows the story of an orphan girl who is one of the few people who remains unaffected by a highly contagious disease that destroys people’s memories and then they die soon afterward. She is chosen to go to a special medical facility to research those who are immune to the disease. It sounds like a potentially great story, but I have to admit that it wasn’t my favorite.

Find Me was written in a stream-of-consciousness style, and in present tense. These are two of my reading/writing pet peeves, but I was willing to overlook them because the premise of the story sounded good. The first half of the book was dreary and depressing, filled with gloomy flashbacks, but that was okay because it fit the character of the narrator and her history. I was happy to see that the plot was starting to move along at a quicker pace in the second half, but then it had even more of a stream-of-consciousness style and the whole thing took on an aura of dreamlike unreality and there were some uncomfortably strange characters – I feel like I would have understood them more, given them more of a chance, had they been described and related in the story more clearly. It was like trying to understand characters in a long free form poem. And I started wondering if the main character was dreaming or drugged, because everything she encountered was so weird. Then it ended without really explaining much of anything to the reader.

*Spoilers ahead* There was no explanation about what the sickness was that caused people to forget, you find out the end fate of the people in the hospital but not the hows and/or whys. And even though there’s the possibility of her meeting the woman she thinks is her mother, that too is never known for sure. *End Spoilers*

The whole book was an exercise in reading frustration for me. After I was done reading I flipped to the back cover flap and read the author’s blurb. It stated that she has published short stories but that this is her first novel. It was a moment of revelation for me because it made me realize that this style of writing that I don’t care for, it has a lot of the same elements of certain short stories that I can’t stand, mainly the dream-like state and the open ending.

I think that the author had some interesting plot ideas, but her writing style was not my cup of tea. I think that those who like open-ended short stories may have a better reading experience than I did.

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