Joy Jones, the narrator of Find Me, has spent her whole life waiting to be found. As a baby she was left on the steps of a hospital and she lived in multiple foster homes since. She works the graveyard shift of a supermarket, where she steals cough syrup to get high to be able to forget everything around her for a while. When a lethal epidemic sweeps across the country, Joy is lucky: she is immune. She is invited to stay at a hospital with a group of survivors, where a man called dr. Bek can study them for possible genetic abnormalities. In the hospital, where Joy feels more and more imprisoned, she discovers more about her mother and a desire to meet her starts to grow.

Find Me is split in two parts. The first half chronicles Joy’s experiences in the hospital and the memories of her traumatic past. The second part tells the story of her bizarre road trip from Kansas to Florida to meet the woman whom she assumes to be her mother. In this unique and strange story, Joy encounters an array of peculiar characters who help her in her search for her mother and herself.

In her somewhat dark, but also funny and daring debut novel Find Me, Laura van den Berg creates a strange and dystopian world in slick and beautiful sentences. This tale about loss, loneliness, survival and a search for healing and the reason to live is very haunting and invites the reader to think about identity and the value of life.