Find Me (Find Me, #1)

by Romily Bernard

When teen hacker and foster child Wick Tate finds a dead classmate's diary on her front step, with a note reading "Find me," she sets off on a perverse game of hide-and-seek to catch the killer.

• ISBN10: 0062229044
• ISBN13: 9780062229045
• Publish Date: 26 August 2014 (first published 24 September 2013)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Imprint: Collins
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 336
• Language: English

Reviews

[celinenyx]

Find Me is a young-adult thriller about a girl from a messed up family that tries to find out who killed one of her childhood friends. Although I quite liked this idea of a more gritty kind of thriller featuring a female main character that hacks for a living, the execution wasn't great. The book was quite decent, but I feel like I've read this story before. The hacking part is incredibly bland and is only mentioned in the background, and the romance, though believable, felt very icky to me. The explanation of the killer didn't sit right with me either, and I felt like this wasn't the way humans act and evolve.

Find Me was an easy read, but not very memorable. It reminded me of a less poignant and heart-breaking Mind Games.

Meh. This book was thoroughly average for me. The writing was good, but I felt like the story was stretched pretty thin to make a full length novel. I think it would have worked much better as a novella. As it is, there are quite a lot of sluggish passages, and the mystery overall is very slow moving. I did like Wick's voice, though she struck me as a more bitter and less resourceful Veronica Mars with decidedly less humor.

If you read this year's darkly humorous NO ONE ELSE CAN HAVE YOU by Kathleen Hale, another YA mystery, expect to find a very similar plot with the protagonist trying to solve the mystery surrounding a friend's death via her diary and discovering she didn't know her friend very well in the process. Even though the tones of these two books is very different, my enjoyment ranks about the same--although for different reasons.

The romance had potential and promises to become better in the future, the mystery was decent although the ending was kind of a let down, and the hacker angle was different, but I don't think I'll be coming back. It just wasn't very compelling.

[Rowena]

Wick is a nerd. She’s also a hack. She hacks into people’s lives for work. Women come to her to find out if their husbands or partners are cheating on them and she finds out for them. For a fee. It’s wrong, she knows that but it’s also the only thing she’s really good at doing without getting caught so she does it, to save money for when her and Lily need to move on. Because their con of an abusive father is going to come back for them and Lily may not want to deal with it but someone has to…and that person is Wick.

This is a suspense book with a teenage protagonist and while the suspense in this book is pretty easy to figure out, it was still an enjoyable read. I liked the person that we see Wick become and the love interest was a cutie patootie. I liked the way that Griff had her back through thick and thin and toward the end when Griff struggles with leaving Wick behind with the bad guy? My inner teenager swooned with delight. It was adorable.

I will definitely be checking out more from this author. Her writing style flows nicely and I liked the reading adventure she took us on with this book.

[Ashley]

Nose Graze — Young Adult book reviews

4.5 Stars

HACKING?!?! THIS IS SO AN ASHLEY BOOK!!

I seek out hacking/computer/nerd/programmer books like a moth to the flame. For me, it's like a bonding session with my fellow epic computer nerds. It's awesome. And Find Me was just like that, but it also had a super cool mystery element to it!

I've read a few reviews where people said they "saw the twist coming". I have to admit, I didn't. Maybe it's because I was in denial (see spoiler at the end).. but either way, I DID. NOT. SEE. IT. COMING! :| Throughout the whole book we know there's an evil douchebag predator out there preying on young girls. Or at least one young girl, and eying a second one. Although Wick didn't want to be involved, the situation has kind of been thrust into her lap so she takes it on and hunts for the psycho murderer, putting her hacking skills to good use!

Find Me has so many different elements to it, and when you put them together, you truly get an awesome book! We have the hacking, an intense thriller/mystery element, and a romance. I love how they all came together to form a really different book that stands out from so many of the others I've read. And although the romance certainly wasn't the focus of the story, I thought it complimented it nicely. It wasn't too overpowering, but it was still pretty awesome. ;) There were a few hot, swoony moments in there!

But above all, I like how Find Me kept me guessing and doubting. I enjoyed trying to figure everything out so much, that I found myself wishing the book would never end. I wanted to sit there longer and struggle over the pieces, trying to put them together. And some of my favourite parts were the quotes from Tessa's diary at the beginning of each chapter. They were a little morbid and creepy, but they were one of the things I tried to use to piece together who the creepy rapist guy was! I felt like I was the one solving the puzzle (and failing O_O).

Now I do have a few things to say about the ending... I'm not sure I like how it ended. It turns out that her foster father, Todd, was the bad guy. This actually kind of upset me. I wanted a villain that I could really HATE and despise with all the force of my being. But when it turned out it was Todd, I was just devastated. Because before that point, he had been a really nice guy and played the "concerned parent" role really well. He acted like he enjoyed having Wick as his foster-daughter, and he always stood up for her. It made me want Wick to stop doubting her foster parents and believe that they could be good, supporting people—which they always acted like. But when it turned out Todd was the bad guy.. it's like that hope was gone. Wick was always so skeptical of her foster parents, and it's like she got to says "I told you so" to me, because in my head I was constantly yelling at her to trust them. I'm just bummed that the bad guy ended up being a character I liked. I wanted it to be one I hated (like Tessa's dad, even though he was the "too obvious to be true" choice).

I will mention that as a complete nerd, I do have a tendency to severely nit-pick at computer/technology books. If I read about computer/hacking things that aren't that realistic/feasible, they scream at me. I did find one thing that irked me, but I think only finding one thing is pretty darn good. :P

I've embedded Trojans in Flickr accounts, YouTube links, and now, a simple email.

Embedding Trojans in e-mails is perfectly possible (and very common). But in Flickr accounts and YouTube links?? That's not happening. ONCE in a blue moon, for about 5 seconds, there might be a vulnerability on those sites.. but it's the kind of thing that happens so rarely, and when it does happen, they notice and patch it in like 2 seconds. It's certainly not something that someone could be doing frequently!

But when I pointed that out to Romily (actually she saw me telling someone else about it, which was slightly embarrassing because I felt bad!) she took it like a champ! Seriously, that girl pretty much rocks.

Overall, I loved this book! Find Me definitely kept me on the edge of my chair! It was a very hard book to put down, and it drew me in effortlessly! Plus the hacking stuff was AAAAWESOME!