The Ones We’re Meant to Find – Joan He (review!)

Title: The Ones We’re Meant to Find.

Author: Joan He.

Format: Hardcover.

Publisher: Roaring Brook Press.

Page count: 384.

Release day: May 4^th 2021.

Genre: YA, Science-fiction.

Rating: 2.5 stars.

GoodReads summary!

Rating:
Characters: 5/10
Atmosphere: 6/10
Writing: 4/10
Plot: 6/10
Intrigue: 5/10
Logic: 5/10
Enjoyment: 5/10
Average: 5.14

My thoughts:

I was so excited to read this one, but I guess this one just wasn’t for me.

Characters

We read this book from alternating perspectives, from both sisters. Unfortunately both of their perspectives were not really grabbing my attention. Cee’s perspective was a bit better to me since she felt more like a person compared to Kasey, I guess we got more emotions from Cee. Also the side characters didn’t do anything for me.

Plot

The story is about what would happen when climate change would change the world. People live in ecocities, and everyone has a ranking for how good they are (or ancestors were) for the environment. The lower rating the better, more chance that you will be saved. Which honestly sounds like a great idea for a story. But the first 60% was just boring.. I feel like nothing happened, and I was dragging myself through the book. Then after that the plot got more intense, but too much was predictable to me. Which meant the story still wasn’t doing it for me.

The idea of the ecocities were very interesting to me, but I feel we lacked some explanation/world-building. I really couldn’t imagine how this world was working. And I think this is partly because of the writing, which I will go into soon! The author/characters kept talking about not really going somewhere, but only your mind or something. But I kinda got the idea, but I wanted to now how this worked!

Writing

I think my biggest problem with the book was the writing style. I don’t really know how to explain this in English, so I hope it makes sense. The sentences kinda felt disconnected (?) from each other. As in it wasn’t really flowing. This often made me reread paragraphs, since I wasn’t grasping them the first time around.

To be fair this book gets 15/10 points for the cover! And I’m sure there will be readers out there who will love this book. I just don’t think this story or maybe even this author is for me!