The heart wants what the heart wants, and our hearts want books.

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TL/DR: The Ones We’re Meant to Find by Joan He is a potential favorite of the year.  Solid 5 stars. 

Darling readers, I went down a rabbit hole to attempt to remember / discover how The Ones We’re Meant to Find by Joan He landed on my holds list.  It wasn’t in any of the usual places, so my guess is that it came from the Goodreads Awards Best YA Fantasy and Science Fiction nominees list.  This list, which includes 20 titles, is exceptional, if the five I’ve read are any indication.  I have a few more on my TBR too!

If that doesn’t do it for you, The Ones We’re Meant to Find follows Cee, who is stuck alone on an island with no memory of her life before or how she got there, but she knows her sister Kay is out there somewhere and is working to get to her.  It also follows Kasey, a science prodigy who lives in an eco-city where people spend at least a third of their time in stasis pods to diminish their environmental impact.  While Kasey’s content with this lifestyle, her sister Celia craves the outside, and goes missing months before the story opens.  Kasey’s desire to determine exactly what happens to Celia drives the action in this amazing story.  

The Ones We’re Meant to Find is YA science fiction and dives deep into climate change, how communities relate to each other, power, justice, grief, family, implications of AI, celebrity, and more.  The way He layers themes in this mysteriously quiet-feeling story is truly magical, and the way the easter eggs are all laid out is what might drive me to reread this novel.  

My favorite part wasn’t the plethora of themes though, it was the writing.  He’s style is picturesque and melodic.  I could envision both Cee’s island and Kasey’s trip through the stratum.  I was engrossed in the story quickly after finding the rhythm of the alternating perspectives, and did not want the story to end, even when I saw it approaching and thoroughly appreciated the bow at the end.  

As mentioned earlier, I’m giving The Ones We’re Meant to Find five solid stars, and it has potential for a favorite of the year!  We’ll see if I reread it, but I’m very interested in He’s other novels.  

What’s a book that pleasantly surprised you with its depth of theme?

~Nikki 

The Ones We’re Meant to Find is Joan He’s debut novel and it is a doozy. She’s also written last year’s Descendant of the Crane, and Strike the Zither, a duology that will be finished up with next year’s release Sound the Gong. A native Philadelphian, she studied Psychology and East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. But, currently splits her time between Chicago and Philly. As a child she was instructed in oil painting, but we’re so dang glad she decided that “storytelling is her favorite form of expression.” 

Like Nikki, I wish I could have just kept reading. The characters were immensely three dimensional, the plot took some time to figure out (but the slight mystery WAS THE POINT so that is not a complaint, just an observation), and the concept of society in a post-climate change world was amazingly new for me. The relationship between Kasey and her sister Celia was like so many sisterly stories, both a mirror into how other sisters act around and with one another and their other family members and a window into how different most sisters are and how they relate to each other. There were plot surprises I never expected to occur and one or two I anticipated that never came to fruition – but what we got was so much better than the expectation. 

Truly, this YA Science Fiction novel needs to have a genre all on its own, because that just doesn’t do it justice. It’s almost post-apocalyptic because of the new society that was created because of climate change, but yet it’s not. Maybe it’s just apocalyptic because they are still dealing with the process of everything changing – and you’d want space to be a bigger deal than it is, and it’s not and that’s oddly refreshing for science fiction.

I’m also giving this book a five star review. Not one ding dang complaint and so many things to warrant a re-read. Also, an excellent choice for a beach or pool-side title, and I’m so so glad Nikki found this off the Holds List.

~Ashley

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What if you could drink the ambition, drive, and focus of others so that you could achieve amazing things like them?  In Gold Diggers by Sanjena Sathian, you can if you know how to procure gold that is infused with these qualities, and the recipe, and words to make the beverage powerful.  This amazing debut digs into that idea (pun intended) through the eyes of one second-generation Indian-American teen, then follows up with him ten years later.  It explores the struggles of immigrant communities, woes of suburban ambition, and how it all affects teens and the adults they become.  

While Gold Diggers should have been a window to look at the experience some of my friends have faced, there were also parts that felt a bit like a mirror to me.  I’m the third generation on one side to grow up in the same city, so the immigrant portions were definitely a window and I’m grateful for it.  Seeing fictional experiences similar to those experienced by friends and colleagues helps me to have a better understanding as to what their developmental years may have included (because every individual is different).  The pieces that felt familiar were the push to participate and excel because of what parents want for their children.  Neil’s parents want good things for him, but their idea of what that means isn’t the same as his.  They want him to get into an Ivy league school and have a prestigious career, and he doesn’t feel up to that, even though he wants to make them proud.  I didn’t aspire to all that, but I was definitely pushed to do more and become something, just like Neil and his friend Anita.  

Gold Diggers starts with the story of their teen years, which is complex and engaging, and then fast forwards ten years to post-college Neil, which is the part I loved!  Seeing what our characters did with all of their procured (not stolen, nope) drive and ambition, and how it leads to the next portion of the story was so fun.  The world of bridal fairs is also a bit of a mirror for me and a really fun reminiscent moment, as I worked several in college (albeit of the Southern variety) before and after getting to explore the bazaars of southern India.  But truly my favorite part was how the ending came together with so much hope and clarity for Neil and Anita.  

Gold Diggers by Sanjena Sathian is the story of friends who experience hard things, the children of immigrants who are pushed to achieve, a tale of ambition, and even includes a bit of heist and romance.  It’s a fabulous tale well told, even if it didn’t pull me in the way I wanted (it was me, not the book, because my next read was chosen to do just that and still hasn’t…ugh readerly moods).  I’m giving this debut 3.5 stars and rounding up to four.  I’m really excited to see what else Sathian is cooking up for her readers.

What’s a book you might have read at the wrong time, but appreciate despite the poor timing?

~Nikki 

We have a pretty solid habit of reading authors who have graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Sanjena Sathian joins the ranks of authors we have reviewed from that institution including Cathy Park Hong, Kiley Reid, and Yaa Gyasi. As Nikki mentioned above, Gold Diggers is Sathian’s debut novel which was published in 2021. It was named a Top 10 Book of 2021 by the Washington Post, a Best Book of 2021 by NPR, and longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, among other accolades. Mindy Kaling’s production company Kaling International has optioned the book for TV adaptation and Sathian is working on that now. In addition to this full-length novel, Sathian’s short fiction has appeared in multiple publications including The Best American Short Stories 2022, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. She currently teaches fiction at Emory University in Atlanta.

This is what happened when we were planning for this May’s Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month: Nikki scours her holds list, finds titles we both have the opportunity to get from the library, and we make a decision. Typically the titles found on that holds list have been recommended by such trusted readers as Anne Bogel of What Should I Read Next Podcast and Jamie B. Golden and Knox McCoy of The Popcast, and occasionally other podcasters and personalities, and often, GoodReads when we can get on top of recommending the upcoming releases to our respective libraries. I would like to state for the record that I truly appreciated this process for this month because I didn’t have a whole lot of extra brain cells to rub together and make a decision about what we should be reviewing this month. I appreciate my book buddy so much for taking that burden from my tired little brain cells and providing us with an intriguing first book for this month.  [Nikki here: It was totally Jamie this time!]

I read the marketing copy before I approved our list from Nikki’s list of titles, but Gold Diggers has exceeded my expectations in a couple ways. I think I expected more of a plot driven story where the action pulls the characters along and I was pleasantly surprised by the characters dictating the plot over and over again. I didn’t expect to get so much inner monologue from our narrator, Neil, but I am so glad that happened. Neil struggled in academics during high school and while writing his dissertation in history (I felt seen because I never finished my undergraduate thesis in history…) while also balancing – or not as was often the case – the use of the myriad addictive substances that he thought allowed his brain to function at a level capable of producing the work expected of him. Like Nikki, I also enjoyed the second half of the book, which takes place in 2016, and the way that Neil and Anita’s relationship has changed. I really appreciated the growth that Anita had when she gently confronted Neil about his addictions. I could tell that she knew that Neil was not his addiction and that she couldn’t get him to stop his substance abuse unless he wanted to. I didn’t expect these deep themes from the premise of magical lemonade, but it worked!

I’m giving Gold Diggers four stars. It will be a solid recommendation to other readers. I’m here for anything else Sathian releases, but I’m unlikely to re-read this title. I kept thinking of my sister’s desi friend from high school who was low-key obsessed with Kanye’s Gold Digger, and I really just want to send her this book title and say that I kept thinking of her.

What book have you read that made you think of a specific person to whom you wanted to recommend it?

~Ashley

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