Find Me: A Novel

Laura van den Berg has quickly become one of today’s hottest young writers after two acclaimed short story collections: 2009’s What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us and 2013’s The Isle of Youth. Her debut novel, Find Me, taps into a realm that Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven and Karen Thompson Walker’s The Age of Miracles effectively dealt with—a quiet apocalypse. In Find Me, protagonist Joy Jones, a nineteen-year-old Kansas grocery store clerk with an addiction to Robitussin, leads a dull, droning existence; Joy’s frustration and longing for more comes through well, thanks to van den Berg’s clear, concise prose. When a strange neurological illness begins to wipe out chunks of Americans, the survivors begin to move to hospitals. Joy finds she’s immune. She breaks out of the hospital and journeys from Kansas to Florida in search for her birth mother, who’d abandoned her as a baby. Find Me is highly intriguing, and it mostly follows through on the anticipation. There are stale periods in the novel, some less-than-fully-fledged characters, but that’s to be expected. When van den Berg gets it right, it’s wonderful. That Find Me is her debut novel means there’s only better to come. She’s certainly one to watch.