Review Detail

What I Loved:

I finished reading over an hour ago, and I still don't know how to sum up my thoughts. IF YOU FIND ME is at once heartbreaking, compelling, insightful, and achingly beautiful. The story wrapped around me from the first page and wouldn't let me go, even when I was forced to set the book aside for things like sleep and food. This is one of those rare books that will claim a corner of my heart forever.

I'll start with the most compelling aspect of the story: the narrator Carey. Kidnapped at a young age and raised in the woods by her drug addict mother, Carey is both wise beyond her years and crushingly naive. Her voice is a lyrical combination of backwoods Tennessee mountain and old English poet, courtesy of the textbooks her mother would sometimes pick up from garage sales and bring back to Carey. The prose is lyrical and lovely and sprinkled with unusual metaphors that bring both Carey and the world of the story to life.

The characters that populate the book are all nuanced. There are no cookie cutter characters here. Every interaction had an air of authenticity about it. Family ties, even those that are strained and need time to heal, are both lovingly and realistically depicted. There's a wealth of pain locked inside of Carey and her little sister, and the author wisely offers no easy answers. No sudden solutions that dissolve years of neglect and abuse and turn the girls into "normal" kids overnight. Instead, the road to healing is hard. Sometimes harder than the road they took to become broken. The process hurts not just Carey and Janessa, but the other characters as well. Kudos to the author for approaching mental health, healing, and abuse with careful insight and wisdom.

What Left Me Wanting More:

Absolutely nothing. This book swallowed me whole from the moment I started reading.

I want to be clear that the way this book handles abuse and neglect, and the subsequent struggle to heal, is something I feel every reader could benefit from reading. The lovely prose and compelling storyline make it an enjoyable journey. As a survivor of abuse myself, I want to personally place this book in the hand of every single girl like me. At the same time, I feel it only fair to mention that there are two or three paragraphs (and one scene) that might be triggers for abuse survivors. I found all of it to be handled with care and delicacy, but readers who are especially sensitive may feel otherwise.

Final Verdict:

With lyrical prose and expert story-telling, IF YOU FIND ME is a hauntingly beautiful look at love, true self identity, and what it takes to heal.