Hello, friends! I’m back with a blog tour review for I Will Find You Again by Sarah Lyu. Special thanks to the TBR & Beyond Tours team for organising the tour and including me in it!

Thanks to Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers for providing a digital ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Click here or on the banner above to check out the rest of the fantastic bloggers on tour!

Note: The quotes below are taken from an advanced copy and are subject to change in the final version.

TL;DR: This was a YA mystery that I don’t think I could’ve expected and I think will be very different to what many people expect too, but for me, it was very much in a good way! This story tackles some really tough issues that were hard to read about and I would recommend checking out the content/trigger warnings beforehand because although I think this author handled these issues sensitively, she also doesn’t sugarcoat the reality of them. These pages are packed with so much tension, raw emotion, and heartbreaking moments between best friends and lovers and the struggles they face living up to societal, cultural and familial expectations. Overall, an impressive mystery that I would recommend and I can’t wait to read more by this author soon!

“Sometimes, I think there isn’t enough air in this town. Not enough air in the world for a girl like me.”

Honestly, this is a pretty difficult book to leave a review for because I really don’t want to give spoilers and it’s very much a book that I recommend you go into knowing as little as possible. I mean, that’s not different from what I’d say about many mysteries but there’s a lot more to this than meets the eye. Although it does get off to a somewhat slow start as the mystery builds up and we follow along with a very unreliable narrator, the story ends up taking a path that I didn’t expect and I think I appreciated this story more because of it. The story is told partially through flashbacks as Chase pieces together the messy and broken puzzle of everything leading up to what happens to Lia. There’s a very melancholy and morose yet at times somewhat hopeful tone that fit the mystery and the love story between Lia and Chase very well. The tension is built up really nicely as the pace quickens and I soon found myself madly flipping through the pages until everything quietly explodes at the end. Lyu really knows how to saturate the pages of her novel with intense emotion and it was hard to not become invested in this story and its characters.

“Isn’t it fun to think we could come back as someone else? Wouldn’t it be amazing, finding each other again in another life? A different one?”

Chase isn’t necessarily a likeable character (though tbh I didn’t find any of the characters very likeable except for Chase’s little sister) and I vacillated between feeling sympathy for the situation she finds herself in and at the same time kind of hating her for being so frustratingly selfish and oftentimes cruel. This story revolves around Chase and the somewhat toxic and love-blind relationship with Lia and although Lia doesn’t get her own perspective, I feel like she was just as real a character as Chase. Through their story, Lyu explores some fairly heavy themes that I would definitely recommend checking out the content/trigger warnings for because this was pretty hard to read at times and can be triggering.

“I don’t want to be stuck, don’t want to be defined by the things that happened to me, don’t want to spend the rest of my life forever circling them.”

I appreciated how the author explored the impact of societal, familial, and cultural pressures that we put on teenagers to not only excel academically and in their extracurriculars but also pretty much have the rest of their lives figured out by that age. It’s certainly not an isolated experience and it’s completely unrealistic to expect them to handle the mental, emotional and physical stress they put themselves through in order to fulfil these expectations, especially in today’s society. It’s incredibly toxic and it’s no wonder that the heavy burden they carry from such a young age can get channelled into negative outlets and coping mechanisms. I feel like it’s really important to keep pointing the spotlight on this issue because this unhealthy culture is not changing and it should!

“This life-and-death pressure of getting it right at the age of seventeen or else your entire life was nothing but an immense failure. No second chances, no room for mistakes, doubts, exploration. That was the message we got our whole lives.”

Aside from that, I think Lyu also handled the other serious topics she brings into the story very sensitively. I’ve mentioned it before but I liked how she really took this in a completely different direction than I expected. I thought I had it all figured out at the beginning and I was ready to be sort of “whelmed” by the result, but I was shockingly surprised! By the end, I found myself tearing up over the whole situation and just how awfully heartbreaking it is, and then I got to the end of the author’s note and it did set off my tears because it was a powerful way to dedicate and end the book.

“It’s okay to cry, it’s okay to be sad […] it’s okay to need people, it’s okay to need help.”

Overall, I thought this was a great queer YA mystery that pleasantly surprised me. There was great representation and the handling of hard topics was done well. I enjoyed the author’s writing style and the level of emotion she infused into the story and I’m now eager to check out more of her work in the future!

Have you read I Will Find You Again or is it on your TBR?

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