This month we read The Ones We’re Meant to Find by Joan He, a novel about sisterhood, memory, and identity. We picked this novel in part because of its gorgeous cover by Turkish artist Aykut Aydoğdu. We were drawn in by the cover but we stayed for the wild sci-fi ride. Let’s jump in. 

Mary: So The Ones We’re Meant to Find is about two sisters, Cee and Kay, who desperately want to find each other. Cee woke up on an island with nothing but her wits and a dictionary robot companion to help her. She remembers almost nothing, but she does know that she has a sister named Kay that she wants–needs– to find. Kay knows that Cee loved the world outside their city in the sky, but she didn’t know just how far Cee would go to leave it. Kay teams up with someone from Cee’s past in order to find out more about her missing sister, but she’s not ready for the answers she’ll find. Joan He has one other novel, Descendant of the Crane, which I’ve never read, have you?

(Needless to say, spoilers will follow for The Ones We’re Meant to Find.)

Emily: No, I never read Descendant of the Crane. But, yeah, Mary, that was a really good summary of the book. I say that because I feel like this is one of those books that’s super difficult to talk about in detail without spoiling. So I commend you for getting a lot of info out there about the book without giving anything huge away! But as you said, we can’t promise that moving forward! We’re going into spoilers now. 

Mary: There’s no getting around the fact that The Ones We’re Meant to Find is about climate change in a very real way. Essentially, the world is overpopulated and polluted, making living on the surface of Earth nearly impossible. Instead of continuing to live on the dangerous, uninhabitable world, people have taken to the skies in flying cities. Well, the people who can afford to leave Earth, that is. While Kay and Cee’s family have the money and power to live in a floating city, plenty of people don’t, and through no fault of their own. 

Every person in the world has a ranking determined by how much they or their family has polluted the earth. The people with the smallest carbon footprint get privileges others don’t, but sometimes, as we find out later in the book, people with enough money can cover up their misdeeds. This creates a huge class divide centered around a global climate crisis, which is...uncomfortably real. There are a lot of climate change books out there, but what makes this one different? Did that plot work for you? 

Emily: So one of the things about this set up that I think is interesting is the way this class system works and the moral judgment that’s attached to different rankings. Which isn’t too far off from how we look at things now. People make assumptions (unfairly) about those from lower classes, about the choices they’ve made to end up in the position they’re in. And people are quick to consider themselves on moral high grounds for various reasons. So, like, Kay/Kasey does a lot of really morally questionable things, but because she feels like she’s doing the right thing for humanity and for the environment. But there’s this whole part of her plan that’s like, well, some people deserve to live because they’ll do good things for the planet. And some people are just naturally going to fuck things up for everyone else, so they don’t deserve to live. You know, I’d be lying if I said I’ve never felt that way before. I’ve definitely thought to myself, “You know, what if we just killed off all of the people in this world who are wrong? Then the rest of us could actually get shit done.” But do I actually think that’s okay? No. I don’t know if I’m making sense. Are you following?

Mary: Yeah, that definitely makes sense to me, and I think we’ve all felt that at one point or another. It’s just part of thinking “wouldn’t it be easier if…?” It’s not okay, and I wouldn’t want to actually do that, but it’s crossed my mind when things have been really frustrating. I do think morality is really complicated in this novel, which is a cool thing to see being parsed out. Kasey is definitely a little amoral throughout the book. She doesn’t consider who her actions will hurt, and even when she does she has a weird view of things. I think throughout the novel Kasey is very “big picture” and Celia is “small picture.” Kasey wants to make world changing impacts and Celia wants her immediate circle and herself to be happy.

A couple of things I loved about this story: the narrative style and the twists. These two things are kind of related, I guess. The chapters jump back and forth between Kay and Cee, giving readers a sense of security of what’s going on with each sister. Readers think they know that while Kay is searching for Celia, plucking through her Intraface memories, Cee is safe on the island trying to find a way back to her sister. Instead, we learn mid-novel that the two sisters are separated by a vast time span (almost 1000 years), and Cee isn’t really Kay’s sister at all, but a robotic replica of her. That all sounds kind of bananas, and it is. It felt shocking while I was reading it, which surprised me because I feel like we usually figure out twists in YA novels pretty easily. This book really stunned me with how well it tricked me, and how impactful the trick actually was. This didn’t feel like an empty twist to me. 

Emily: Yes, this was a really great twist, and I didn’t expect it at all. I also really liked how as the twist was being revealed, the chapters got really short and we got a really quick back-and-forth between Kay’s presentation of her plan in the past and the future where Cee is realizing that she’s not human and that she was programmed to find Kay. The swaps back and forth are so quick that it almost gives you whiplash in the best way. I will say, though, that my main problem with this was that you get this big reveal where the drama really amps up, and in a really dramatic move, Cee rejects her fate and leaves Kay to die. She returns to the island and leaves Kay behind so that she herself doesn’t get terminated. From there, the pace slows back down, and we still had about 100 pages left to go. So that just felt a little… odd to me? What did you think about the overall pacing of this story?

Mary: It felt odd to me too, and the ending felt pretty anticlimactic because I felt like we already knew everything that was being revealed, but it somehow still worked for me. I didn’t feel disappointed when I finished the book—in fact, I really enjoyed it. So many YA novels now are written with the understanding that they’ll turn into a series, so all that drama and action has to lead up to readers wanting more in another novel. I liked that The Ones We’re Meant to Find ended up being completely self contained, which gives readers a nice bit of denouement, some time to wind down at the end of the novel and wrap up loose ends.

The other big twist in the book is that Actinium (what a name) is actually the sisters’ neighbor, who supposedly died in the same horrific plane crash that killed his parents and the girls’ mother. He lived by sending a bot in his place, hoping to prove a point to his mother. Instead, he just got a convenient way to fake his own death and live a different life. For whatever reason, this came as a shock to me too, and again, it worked! It’s definitely a little edgelord-y to have Act be the sisters’ long lost neighbor, but it felt like it made sense with how the story was going at the time. 

Emily: I was surprised by this too! But like you said with the Kay/Cee twist, this was another one that doesn’t seem like an empty twist. Like I was surprised by it, but not because it seemed unlikely. We even get a moment where Kasey is looking back and remembering that there was a telltale sign that should have clued her in to the fact that the version of him that died was actually a bot. And yeah, Actinium is a weird name. There are a few kind of questionable names in this book. This is definitely one of those YA sci-fi books where the author was like, “Yes, in the future people will have weird names.” 

Mary: Look, I love a weird name, so I really can’t say anything. I did laugh when we got the line that was something like, yes he was named after the scientist that discovered cures to diseases and found the actinium compound.

Do we want to talk about the romance in the book? How does the end put that romance into perspective? 

Emily: Okay, so basically, Cee is alone on this island, until a boy shows up with no memories. He tries to kill her a couple of times, but whatever, he’s cute. So she names him “Hero,” and they become very close. They start to form a romantic bond. They have sex. When Cee leaves Kasey and comes back to the island, we get the feeling that a lot of the reason she chose to do this is not simply because Cee doesn’t want to die. But rather Cee wants to stay with Hero. She doesn’t tell Hero about what happened. She lies and says she didn’t find her sister. 

But when Hero finds out the truth—that he’s actually a bot and that he’s tried to kill Cee multiple times—he throws himself off a cliff so that Cee can decide for herself if she wants to stay on the island. Don’t worry, he will be able to regenerate in a few hours (I think), but that’s not the point. The point is that Hero was really the main thing stopping Cee from fulfilling her mission. 

Plot twist: it’s because he was designed that way. Towards the end of the book, Actinium hints that Hero’s whole romance with Cee was a way of keeping her from fulfilling her duty. And it works. But it’s also like the same programming that is supposed to get Hero to fall in love with Cee is also the programming that makes him stop himself from stopping Cee. So that whole plot didn’t end up working out. It also suggests that Hero truly loved Cee and was able to push against his programming to “stop her” in the same way Cee is able to decide whether she wants to save her sister or not. What do you think?

Mary: Definitely, it’s kind of like their programming does and does not work. Sure, he stops Cee from waking up her sister, but by that point Cee’s already made the choice to leave Kay at the bottom of the ocean, so it kind of doesn’t matter? It does feel like this book is dipping a toe into the whole “can robots love” plot, which is a sci-fi classic that I love. And surprisingly for a YA novel, I found Cee and Hero’s relationship really compelling and the sex scenes were actually interesting and not cringey IMO. It felt like they’d had enough experiences together, even in their short time, to justify a romance, especially considering how long Cee had been alone. 

By the end of the novel, I felt like my perspectives on the sisters had completely changed. I know this was an intentional move the novel was making, but I still found it interesting. At the beginning of the novel I really admired Kay, particularly how much she wanted to find her sister and how much she seemed to value family, but by the end of the novel I decided that Kay was an absolute sociopath who didn’t care about much of anyone but Celia. Cee, on the other hand, starts out so one-track-minded and focused on finding Kay–it felt annoying. Yet by the end of the novel we find out that she’s just programmed that way, and she makes a conscious decision to live for herself. I think this is a level of complexity in plot a lot of YA novels won’t touch, and that was definitely an asset for me. 

Emily: You know I love a good “what makes us human?” sci-fi story, and ultimately this ends up being one of those. I loved how Cee ended up having to separate her identity from that of Celia. Because for the longest time, any time a memory would come to her, she thought it was her own. And she formed attachments to Kay because of this. She really had to unlearn that attachment and realize that those memories were never really hers. It also got me thinking about how closely memory and identity are related. We are in no small part formed by the things we remember and how those memories make us feel. It’s how Kay was able to create Cee in the first place. 

Mary: For sure. Without our memories we aren’t really ourselves, which is why things like Alzheimer’s disease are so heartbreaking. Even when your body is sick, you’re still you, still trying to hold onto your personality and likes and dislikes, but when your brain’s sick you really change personalities in a way that’s upsetting to both yourself and your loved ones. It’s hard. I think that Cee becoming her own person, so to speak, was really cool, and the book doesn’t treat that process lightly. It’s hard for Cee to separate herself from the memories of Celia, and she struggles to form her own identity and come to terms with what her life is going to be like. 

Emily: I want to talk about the Cee storyline versus the Kay storyline. I’m especially curious to see what you think because I feel like you’re way more into hard sci-fi than I am. For me, I cared a lot more about Cee than I did about Kay. I had a really hard time getting into Kay’s story, and I really just wanted to read about Cee on the island. The Kay storyline is MUCH more sci-fi-heavy than the Cee storyline, so I’m wondering if that’s part of it, and I’m wondering how you felt as well.

Mary: I felt the same way, and definitely found Cee more interesting because there’s more mystery there, especially in the second half of the novel when Cee is trying to make some big decisions about her own personhood. In the first half of the novel I was interested in Kay because she also had a mystery, and was trying to figure out what happened to Celia. We definitely learn more about the world during Kay’s chapters, which I enjoyed, but Cee is more emotionally-driven. I think in the second half of the book I really started realizing, oh, Kay’s a sociopath, and I started enjoying her chapters less. That being said, I couldn’t put any of it down. I cheered for Cee during her chapters and I watched Kay like a train wreck headed towards some emotionally distant, evil reckoning. 

Emily: So let’s talk about the ending. How did you feel about the way this book ended?

Mary: I felt okay with it just knowing that Cee and Hero would get to live in peace on their tiny island. The world is kind of over, isn’t it? I mean, people are never getting out of their pods.

Emily: It’s interesting that you read it that way, because I saw it as kind of ambiguous. The last thing we see is Cee swimming back out into the ocean, so I was kind of thinking, “Is she going back out to rescue Kay?” Now that Hero is dead (at least for now), what’s stopping her, after all? 

Mary: That’s true...I’m not sure! I kind of read it as her choosing to be herself, alone, and fulfilled that way, but I think you’ve got a great point that it’s possible she was going to rescue Kay. I think that my brain just decided that she was going to live a happy life and didn’t pay attention to what was on the page. Lol. 

We need a review with spoilers to help us out! C’mon, Goodreads community, where are you?

Emily: Apparently we’re both too dumb for this book, in the end. With our PhDs. And we need some smart YA reader to tell us what to think. So if you read this, please give us your take in the comments.

Should we rate this book? And then move on with our lives?

Mary: You know, despite me just not knowing what happens in the end, I really loved this book. I truly couldn’t put it down, and I felt like it drew me in with its take on climate change and sisterhood. I can’t really explain it, but something about He’s writing made sense to me, and I think this is a science fiction YA classic, up there with Feed in how it made me feel. I gave it five stars! (But I also realize that’s largely based on my personal preference)

Emily: I ended up going with three stars. Sometimes I was really into it, and other times it was really slow for me. The pacing felt really uneven, and I wanted to love it more than I did. But I’m glad I read it. 

Mary, do you want to let the people know what’s next, since this next book was a Mary pick?

Mary: Absolutely! Next up we’re reading The Taking of Jake Livingston by Ryan Douglass. First of all, we’re continuing our beautiful covers trend because I absolutely love this one. The novel follows Jake Livingston, who’s one of the few Black kids at his elite prep school. That all sounds normal enough, but things get weird when readers discover Jake can see dead people. Jake meets a school shooter who has more power in the afterlife than he’d ever dreamed, and of course that isn’t good for anyone, so Jake has to journey through the complicated rules of the afterlife in order to save, well, everyone. It seems fun, and has been compared to Get Out, so we had to read it. More POC in horror/supernatural books, please! 

Emily: Yes! Can’t wait! SEE YOU THEN!