The Ones We’re Meant to Find by Joan He

384 Pages | Roaring Brook Press | Science Fiction YA | 5/4/2021

This book was very much Black Mirror but make it Cli-Fi.

It opens on an abandoned island inhabited by Cee, a teen girl who washed ashore three years ago with no memories of her own except for her name and that she has a sister named Kay.

We then jump to the perspective of Kay—aka Kasey Mizuhara—a young prodigy who lives in a glass-enclosed eco-city floating just above the ocean. Kay is still trying to come to terms with her sister’s sudden disappearance while just outside of the eco-city walls, millions are dying from megaquakes and toxins.

The book switches between each perspective as the sisters struggle to find their way back to each other.

He weaves a haunting and mesmerizing tale about humanity and the end of the world.  I found this book absolutely captivating—I ended up reading the last half in one sitting. I’ll be honest, there is like 10% of the ending of this book that  I didn’t totally get but overall I enjoyed this story.

I started this as an audiobook but had to stop almost immediately because I found aspects of He’s writing hard to take in on audio. She uses a lot of parenthetical commas and interrupting clauses that make it hard to keep in the flow of a scene on audio. It also took me time to adjust during the perspective shifts–Cee’s perspective is in first person present while Kasey’s is in third person past. There are also some other stylistic choices made as the stories converge that I think come off really well in the text version.

This made me miss my days of reading YA  dystopian/sci-fi. I know they are still being published and I need to seek more!