Science Fiction Book Review Laura Van Den Berg Find Me

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Spoiler alerts – Penguin-Random House 2015 A young troubled teenage girl, called Joy who is addicted to cough syrup proves to be one of many people immune to a highly contagious terrible killer amnesia strain of an Alzheimer’s like disease ravaging the US, though many others are unaffected too. The girl finds herself incarcerated in a strange psychiatric centre where a doctor hopes to use the power of the mind to help overcome and conquer the strange plague. A few inmates die trying to escape while Joy finds she also needs to flee as she has found out who her mother is, a famous marine biologist, who she wants to meet. Assisted by a man who looks like a lover Joy lost to the plague, she embarks on a strange road trip across the US to find herself as much as her mother. The problem is that the story just doesn’t end. The illness is unexplained, we stop just short of the emotionally charged meeting of mother and daughter promised, and everyone Joy meets is more eccentric than the last. There is much great poetry here, and Joy’s psychiatrist, who is more of a guru than a psychologist is beautifully, tragically portrayed, but far from fining Joy, the story ultimately loses itself instead. Arthur Chappell