Hi again! Welcome to my stop on the blog tour for Joan He’s The Ones We’re Meant to Find, hosted by Paola. If you’re on Book Twitter you’ve probably seen the gorgeous cover for this book floating around, and now it’s time to probe beneath the surface (puns intended).

Book Information:

Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Release Date: May 4th, 2021
Genre: Young Adult Science Fiction/Dystopian

Synopsis:

One of the most twisty, surprising, engaging page-turner YAs you’ll read this year—We Were Liars meets Black Mirror, with a dash of Studio Ghibli.

Cee awoke on an abandoned island three years ago. With no idea of how she was marooned, she only has a rickety house, an old android, and a single memory: she has a sister, and Cee needs to find her.

STEM prodigy Kasey wants escape from the science and home she once trusted. The eco-city—Earth’s last unpolluted place—is meant to be sanctuary for those commited to planetary protection, but it’s populated by people willing to do anything for refuge, even lie. Now, she’ll have to decide if she’s ready to use science to help humanity, even though it failed the people who mattered most.

Review:

Reading The Ones We’re Meant to Find felt like putting together a 3-D crystal puzzle without knowing what the completed puzzle is supposed to be or look like. Even when I managed to get adjacent pieces of the mystery together, I still wasn’t sure what I was looking at until about 50 percent of the way through the story, where suddenly the pieces are all coming together.

You have two storylines told by two narrators, Cee/Celia and Kasey, and there’s an obvious connection between the two threads, but there are also many mysteries and gaps that make it hard to figure out how exactly they connect at first.

Kasey’s character is a tech wiz and part of a political committee responsible for managing the climate crisis, making her the perfect empirically-driven narrator to explore the physical and social architecture of her world, where many people live in soaring eco-cities encasing them in a protective bubble against the destructive forces of a Nature out of equilibrium. Cee’s perspective, by contrast, is more poetic, the artist to Kasey’s scientist. She relies more on passion and impulsive emotion to drive herself. Her life is one of physical isolation from other people as she is stranded on an island without her memories to guide her. Nature is what surrounds her, inescapable, powerful, and as unsettling as it is magnetic.

Between Celia and Kasey, I definitely saw more of myself in Kasey, being introverted, awkward, and having a rough time dealing with other people even while strongly committed to making the world better for everyone. But both sisters have secrets and insecurities and flaws. The story explores their sense of loneliness and the critical choices they make when the stakes become impossibly high. Even though they seem like polar opposites and envy each other’s strengths, they share an unabiding love for each other at their core that keeps them linked together.

The futuristic worldbuilding for this story is incredibly textured and detailed. It’s obvious the author put a lot of thought into the scientific and political implications of survival in a precarious society approaching environmental apocalypse. Beyond its aesthetic value, it also serves as a vehicle for the story’s meditation on humanity, both individual and collective. Even as the story probes the darkness and selfishness of humankind and the temptation of a eco-fascist mentality, it also offers hope and altruism and belief in human goodness to balance things out. It doesn’t provide a neat resolution per se, but it offers some catharsis and space to believe, and that’s the beauty of it.

Book Links:

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About the Author: