SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Ones We're Meant to Find by Joan He

 

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Ones We're Meant to Find by Joan He: https://t.co/mqKvx7ihaq

Short Review: 9 out of 10
1/3

— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) July 14, 2021

Short Review (cont): A fascinating YA Eco-dystopian scifi novel featuring a pair of sisters separated from one another, one who feels for everyone and one who has no feelings for almost anyone, learning to love themselves, and to make their own choices. Stunning ending.
2/3

— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) July 14, 2021

The Ones We're Meant to Find is a YA Dystopian/Ecological Science Fiction novel by Joan He.  It's a short novel featuring two Asian sisters in a world that is on the precipice of destruction due to environmental devastation, where small parts of the population have immigrated to eco-cities in the sky and live part time in stasis and virtual reality.  It's a setup that doesn't seem that unique, but The Ones We're Meant to Find takes it in a very different direction from what I've seen before.  

And it's a fascinating direction, featuring two very different sisters, in two different settings, trying to find the truth about each other.  One sister is full of empathy for others, filled with love for life and wanting to be out, the other is introverted and has a hard time truly caring for others aside from her sister, and feels wrong as a result of it.  It's a story about learning to love one's self and that how one is different doesn't make them wrong, as well as one with questions about privilege and whether or not humanity deserves to be saved after all the consequences they've wrought.  And it ends with some clear answers and some not so clear, which really works.  

More specifics after the jump:

-------------------------------------------Plot Summary--------------------------------------------
Cee has been stuck on a seemingly deserted island for the last three years.  She doesn't remember nearly anything about her past life except for one crucial thing: She has a sister out there, Kay, who she needs to get back to.  And so she's built a limited AI helper bot and has scrounged the shore for parts to a boat, called Hubert, that she can use to leave the island and find her sister.  But after a failed attempt, she comes back to the island to find something new: another boy washed up on the shore.  

16 year old Kasey Mizuhara lives in an eco-city, one of the cities built in the air above a dying Earth.  Kasey is a brilliant scientist, with brilliant ideas, but she has never really felt empathy towards anyone else, except for her sister Celia, and has always felt wrong for not feeling more.  But three months ago, Celia left on a boat ride and disappeared without her, and is presumed by most to be dead.  But Kasey, whose mind might contain the only solution that could save the human race, isn't willing to let Celia go, and her search for what happened to her sister will lead her to realize things about herself and humanity that she never could have imagined.....
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The Ones We're Meant to Find is setup in a pretty classic YA fashion - we have two protagonists with a seemingly obvious connection in different places, whose stories we alternate between.  And the two protagonists are obviously connected, with Cee clearly being somehow Kasey's sister Celia, despite the timelines not matching up and it seemingly being more and more impossible, leading to an eventual reveal of some kind - although what the answer is to the obvious mystery isn't revealed till about 60% of the way through.  

But it's a reveal that both changes everything and leads in some really interesting directions, as guided by our two main characters' key differences, as setup by the future envisioned here by He.  It's a world where environmental disaster has left the Earth unstable, with disasters like megaquakes and radiation making living on the surface extremely perilous, and making the ecocities where some of the lucky humans have retreated to clearly only a temporary solution.  There's certainly a lot of privilege involved here, with the eco cities supposedly taking people based upon what they and their ancestors did to help the world prior to the collapse starting, and forcing people into a highly restricted virtual environment just to survive inside them.  And the people inside the Eco Cities are trying to come up with ways to save the world...but have some odd ethical codes that interfere with same, and are further ignorant of even those less fortunate who live with them in the eco cities.  

Into this world comes Kasey, a girl who feels like she must be wrong because she doesn't really care or have empathy for most other people.  She especially noticed this when her mother died and she didn't really feel anything, and the only one she cares about is her sister Celia.  Kasey is brilliant, with technological knowhow and scientific expertise that could save humanity...but she doesn't really want to.  It's a brilliance that once got her into trouble, when she broke some ethical rules and got restricted from full access to eco city resources in an attempt to make herself feel like others do.  

By contrast, Celia was a girl filled with empathy, who cared not about the science of the eco cities but about freedom and living and loving others.  And so is Cee to some extent - Cee is desperate to find her sister on the island, but she cares about the limited AI robot she's put together, she names the boat she puts together (Hubert), and when she finds a boy on the shore...a boy whose first act is to try and kill her, she desperately tries to understand him and of course falls in love.  And so when confronted with the reveal, she is conflicted heavily by her love for others....and her love for herself.  

It's a theme that the plot deals with in both storylines: as both Cee and Kasey struggle to love themselves as opposed to others or other concepts, as both seem like they should have things wrong with them - Cee, her memory and disabilities, Kasey her lack of empathy and caring.  They both have to learn to love themselves, and to see if that can guide them through choices.  And it raises of course a question of to how far should empathy and caring extend?  Should it extend to others at the cost of yourself?  Should it extend to those whose actions were the ones that got everyone in trouble in the past?  And these questions lead to misunderstandings and realities, and conflicting viewpoints about who is worth caring about, that lead to a fascinating ending, which is absolutely not what I expected.  But it will certainly leave you thinking hard.