Find Me

September 22, 2014
The debut novel from van den Berg brings the lightly speculative touch to
real-world longing that characterizes her collections What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us and The Isle of Youth, but against an apocalyptic backdrop that, at first, feels all too familiar. As a mysterious illness spreads across the world, a 19-year-old orphan girl called Joy Jones is living as ward of the sinister Hospital, along with other immune children, subject to the strange experiments of Dr. Bek, whose interest in Joy extends beyond medical inquiry. Indeed, amid an “epidemic of forgetting,” Joy fights for her memories of life, and hopes to be somehow reunited with her mother, whom she believes to be a nautical detective, a finder of lost ships, operating off the coast of Florida. Hoping to escape the fate of the Hospital’s other residents and nurtured by rumors of the outside world, Joy journeys from Kansas City to Florida, chasing visions alongside her only companion, a boy in a rubber mask named Marcus. This post-Hospital half of the novel plays to van den Berg’s strengths, with wild excursions into dangerous new environments populated by memorable oddballs, never losing sight of the emotional core of Joy’s quest. The earlier chapters are hampered by future-isms that are cliché and conclusions that feel tedious or foregone—but in Joy, van den Berg has created a voice that never feels false, only lost and dreaming of being found.

December 1, 2014
In the last days of modern civilization, a young orphan from Boston makes her way across the dangerous wastelands of America. This is not an adventure for her. Post-apocalyptic novels can bend in a lot of directions-in the past decade we've seen the murky emotional depths of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the political metaphor of World War Z by Max Brooks, and the fragile state of fear of Edan Lepucki's California. This debut novel by acclaimed short story writer van den Berg (The Isle of Youth, 2013, etc.) tends to lean much closer to the realms of literary fiction with its complex psychology. Our heroine is the ironically named Joy Jones, an emotionally barren young woman with no family or friends who now slogs at a day job under the influence of a soul-deadening amount of cough syrup. She's not the most ebullient spirit even before a modern plague strikes, killing half the world. She's given to saying things like, "I wonder if I will ever know what it's like to feel at peace," and "No one will ever write a Wikipedia page for me." As hundreds of thousands of victims succumb, Joy is taken to a hospital complex in Kansas where she's subjected to strange tests both medical and psychological, has emotionless sex with her roommate and recoils at the deaths of twin boys. While at the hospital, Joy learns that her long-lost mother is an underwater archaeologist featured in a series of television documentaries that she watches like they are her only lifeline. The remainder of the book covers Joy's trek to find her mother, traveling in the company of Marcus, a boy who shared one of her many foster homes. Van den Berg's writing is curiously beautiful, and her portrayals can also be disarmingly sensitive, as if we might break this girl just by reading about her. "I've grown up knowing the world is fragile," she says. "No one needs to tell me that." A sad story about a sad girl slouching toward the end of the world.

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October 1, 2015

The world is starting to fall apart just as Joy begins putting herself back together. Abandoned by her mother at birth and raised in several foster care and group home situations, Joy has struggled to find direction. When a deadly sickness spreads across the country, first stripping people of their memories and then propelling them from dementia to death, Joy finds out she is immune to this disease and is admitted to a hospital that is looking for a cure. She uses this time to reflect on her life thus far and make a plan to track down her birth mother. The first-person narration allows readers to follow the story through Joy's changing perspective, which creates a mood that subtly moves from ambivalence to determination. Teens will be compelled to discover more about the mystery of the illness, and themes of survival and self-discovery will resonate with them. This debut novel's interesting exploration of how people behave during times of crisis mixed with the dynamics of hospital living is a combination of Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted (Turtle Bay Bks., 1993) and Josh Malerman's Bird Box (Ecco, 2014). VERDICT Give this to introspective teens who enjoy postapocalyptic stories and lyrical language.-Carrie Shaurette, Dwight-Englewood School, Englewood, NJ

Copyright 2015 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 15, 2014
Some first novels swoop in out of the blue; others evolve out of a writer's pristinely crafted short stories. Such is the case with O. Henry Awardwinner Laura van den Berg, who sparked critical acclaim and reader excitement with her distinctive first book, What the World Will Look like When All the Water Leaves Us (2009), a collection of stories about the mysterious and the monstrous. Her second story collection, The Isle of Youth (2013), appeared on many best of the year lists and won the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. Find Me, her transfixing first novel, is in keeping with her short stories thematically, and yet, in its deep soundings, it's a commanding departure. Joy, 19, is locked up in the Hospital along with dozens of other inmates. They're in extreme quarantine, tended to by a staff in full hazmat gear. They were brought to this long-abandoned psychiatric hospital in the vast emptiness of Kansas because they survived direct exposure to the sickness, a highly contagious disease that is rampaging across the country, killing people in the tens of thousands. It's believed that the inmates' blood holds the key to a cure and vaccine. But the protocols for this isolated study are awfully peculiar, their total isolation worrisome. This reads like the beginning of a literary postpandemic or postapocalyptic tale along the lines of Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam trilogy, Edan Lepucki's California (2014), and Chang-rae Lee's On Such a Full Sea (2014), each of which portrays dispossessed young women seeking sanctuary and a way forward in a devastated world. This scenario also brings to mind this season's terrifying and tragic Ebola outbreak. But van den Berg is conducting a more internalized investigation into the complex consequences of abandonment and abuse. She is asking how one faces the tumult and tempests of life without roots or an anchor. Left on the front steps of a hospital as a baby, Joy grows up in group and foster homes, where the inexplicable is the norm. She loses her entire eighth yearthe slate rubbed blankafter the psychologist son of her first foster parents moves back home and does something unspeakable to her. When she is 13, she grows close to a gentle, slightly clairvoyant foster brother, Marcus, who wears Halloween masks to conceal his disfigured face. Eventually, Joy ends up living in a windowless basement apartment, working the graveyard shift at a convenience store and drinking cough syrup for a cheap high. Then the aunt she never knew she had, who is dying of the sickness, gives Joy an old photograph of her mother. No name, no information, only a trace resemblance. Brooding, acutely observant, compassionate, suspicious, wistful, and wryly funny, Joy is an entrancing and sympathetic narrator through which van den Berg can channel her abiding fascination with what is submerged, hidden, lurking, lost. On her twentieth birthday, still in the Hospital, Joy watches a Discovery Channel show, Mysteries of the Sea, featuring a ship detective, or underwater archaeologist based in Key West. Joy is certain that this deep-sea sleuth is the woman in the photograph. Her mother.In the second half of the novel, Joy travels through the decimated countryside, determined to reach Key West. Perilous journeys and quixotic quests are literature's archetypal themes, and American fiction is scored by countless cross-country treks, including a growing number of postapocalypic journeys. On Joy's dark odyssey, she travels through eerie, poisoned landscapes, meets an eccentric couple squatting in a rotting, haunted mansion, and is nearly trampled by a stampede of people in black, their faces...

Starred review from January 1, 2015

A deadly virus has swept across America, killing hundreds of thousands. Joy, who was abandoned as an infant and grew up in a series of both foster and group homes, is one of a select few survivors chosen for a specialized course of treatment in a hospital in Kansas. As she follows the mind-numbing routines and regulations of the hospital, Joy begins to suspect that something is being hidden from the patients. By chance she discovers the identity of her birth mother and dreams of finding her, as well as Marcus, a former foster brother. VERDICT Like Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale or Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, van den Berg's debut novel (after two successful story collections) presents a frighteningly plausible near-future dystopia grounded in human elements. Not everything is explained, and things take an increasingly surreal turn in the novel's second half, but Joy's quest, and her need to feel cared for, is heartbreakingly real and compellingly wrought. The book's ambiguous conclusion may lead to rereading as the possibility of multiple interpretations is opened. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 8/4/14.]--Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2014

Van den Berg's first collection of stories was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick; her second won the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction. So the cognoscenti will be paying attention to her first novel, literary dystopian fiction about a down-and-out woman apparently immune to the plague sweeping the country.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2015

A deadly virus has swept across America, killing hundreds of thousands. Joy, who was abandoned as an infant and grew up in a series of both foster and group homes, is one of a select few survivors chosen for a specialized course of treatment in a hospital in Kansas. As she follows the mind-numbing routines and regulations of the hospital, Joy begins to suspect that something is being hidden from the patients. By chance she discovers the identity of her birth mother and dreams of finding her, as well as Marcus, a former foster brother. VERDICT Like Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale or Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, van den Berg's debut novel (after two successful story collections) presents a frighteningly plausible near-future dystopia grounded in human elements. Not everything is explained, and things take an increasingly surreal turn in the novel's second half, but Joy's quest, and her need to feel cared for, is heartbreakingly real and compellingly wrought. The book's ambiguous conclusion may lead to rereading as the possibility of multiple interpretations is opened. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 8/4/14.]--Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.