Book Review: I Will Find You Again by Sarah Lyu

Chase Ohara and Lia Vestiano would seem like complete opposites, but the two teenagers have been best friends for years. Chase has always been driven to succeed, in large part due to her father’s own long standing unhappiness at never having been able to afford to go to Stanford University as a teenager. Now a high-powered consultant, he expects Chase to not only follow in his footsteps but to outperform him by every measure.

Lia is far less straitlaced, and far more into using her mother Jo’s money to travel and have a good time. The adopted daughter of a celebrity chef, she’s the epitome of the privileged East Coast teenager. But her glamorous life masks her unhappiness and insecurity, not helped by how Jo constantly tries to put the spotlight on Lia’s ethnicity for the benefit of Jo’s cooking show: 

Lia hated it. Hates the way strangers asked her to explain her Italian last name and white parents, the way her mom highlighted her “cultural heritage.” In middle school, sick of having to justify her existence, she came up with a line she’d recite to anyone who asked: “I’m ethnically Korean, culturally Italian.” It was her shield, a way to stop the questions, even though sometimes they’d continue.

When Lia and Chase fall in love, it seems both unlikely and like a perfect fit. After all, if they can set aside their differences to be so supportive of one another, then romance can’t be completely out of the question either. But as senior year bears down on them, cracks start appearing in a connection they once thought unshakeable. As Chase focuses more and more on looking like the perfect candidate for Stanford, Lia finds herself begging her girlfriend to pay less attention to school and more attention to her.

Things come to a head in a messy breakup that leaves Chase feeling regretful and hollowed out. To her dismay, Lia seems to quickly move on with new student Hunter van Leeuwen. So when Chase gets an unexpected text message from her now-ex, she doesn’t know how to respond. What would be the point of meeting in Montauk, as Lia has messaged her hundreds of times before their breakup, if Lia is with someone else now?

Chase only really starts to worry when Jo calls several days later to ask if she knows where Lia is. Chase begins searching for the girl she still considers her best friend, even swallowing her pride and asking Hunter for help. Hunter has no idea where Lia is, but is convinced that if something bad has happened to her, that it has to do with Cole Landau, Chase’s illicit source for the pills she takes to help her focus and study. Reluctantly, Chase realizes that she will have to infiltrate Cole’s inner circle in order to figure out what happened to Lia. Will her investigations jeopardize her entire future or, even worse, her life?

I Will Find You Again is a dark exploration of the pressures placed on high-performing teenagers to succeed, as well as a painfully honest depiction of children with mental illnesses. The narrative isn’t exactly straightforward, but that only heightens the drama and mystery at the core of this novel. The characters can be tough to like – Chase’s dad in particular, is a petulant child in adult’s clothing – but you can almost always understand where they’re coming from. 

Chase is fully cognizant of how terrible she herself can be, as when she decides to use a difficult earlier chapter from Lia’s life in order to help her get into Stanford:

I’d already planned to write my personal essay on that summer, mining Lia’s tragedy to […] provide substance and depth to my application. I already knew I’d have to invent a moral to the story, about the importance of access to mental health care perhaps. Or maybe a hard lesson learned about prioritizing what really mattered in life. It didn’t matter if it was bullshit and it didn’t matter if it was Lia’s personal struggle and not my story to tell. I was playing a game. This is what you did, this was the only way to win.

Chase’s cynicism is put to the test by Lia’s disappearance, as she slowly realizes that maybe nothing, not even getting into the college of her father’s dreams, is worth the slow collapse of everything that makes up who she is. Whether it be her physical health, her relationships or her moral integrity, Chase has been willing to put everything on the line in order to fulfill her father’s ambitions for her. It’s thus exceptionally satisfying to watch her realize that she’s more than an extension of her father’s will, even if the catalyst for this epiphany is a particularly harrowing time in her own life. Overall, this book can be hard to read, but it will probably save more than one young reader from burnout or worse, if not outright encourage them to get the help they need.