When Laura wakes up after her office Christmas party and sees a man’s shirt on the floor, she is horrified. But this is no ordinary one-night-stand regret.
Laura suffers from severe face-blindness, a condition that means she is completely unable to identify and remember faces. So the man she spent all night dancing with and kissing – the man she thought she’d brought home – was ‘Pink Shirt’.
But the shirt on her floor is blue.
And now Laura must go to work every day, and face the man who took advantage of her condition. The man she has no way of recognising.
She doesn’t know who he is . . . but she’ll make him pay.
I'd like to thank Anne Cater from Random Things Through my Letterbox for inviting me to be a part of this blog tour and Transworld for my copy of When I Find You which I received from NetGalley to review.
Face-blindness, or Prosopagnosia using it's medical term, is a condition that I'd never heard of before this year yet When I Find You is the second book this year that features a character suffering with this condition. It's hard to imagine how frustrating it must be for sufferers to constantly live in a world where everyone, even looking at themselves in a mirror, is a complete stranger to them unless they have unique identifying qualities to make them easily recognisable. This is the condition that our central character Laura has but she's chosen to keep her condition a secret from all but a handful of her closest family and friends to her detriment.
The book is narrated in alternating chapters from the viewpoints of Laura and her boss Rebecca. At first I wasn't sure what relevance there was to the Rebecca thread, other than she was the only one in the company that knew about Laura's condition, but as the storylines played out and started to merge it all became clear. Although if I'm honest I sped through Rebecca's chapters to get back to Laura's story as this was the storyline that intrigued me the most.
Laura was a character that you couldn't help but be drawn to, she's trying so hard to live with her condition and be independent but in reality she's living a shadow of a life. She doesn't like being out in social environments where her usual methods to identify people are put under extreme pressure and add alcohol to the mix then it's a recipe for disaster especially if someone sees an opportunity and takes advantage of the situation. From that moment on she was someone who was living in fear. She was understandably humiliated and upset that someone had taken advantage of her in her inebriated state, wanting to try and work out who it was that had been in her flat but at the same time trying not to draw further attention to herself.
If Laura was a private person beforehand, she was even more so afterwards. You could really feel her pain oozing from the page as she tries to recall events from that night which quite often made her an unreliable narrator as you didn't know if what she was recalling was true or not. It's clear that Emma Curtis has done a lot of research into face-blindness portraying the difficulties that people with this condition have. It's fair to say that she gave Laura the most extreme variation of the condition which added to the authenticity of the topic and meant that we as readers were as much in the dark as to what was going on as Laura. Everyone including her closest colleagues were a suspect but will she be able to identify her attacker and will anyone believe her when she can't identify them visually?
With so many psychological thrillers in the market it's hard to stand out from the crowd but with its unique concept, numerous twists and surprises, When I Find You certainly had me on tenterhooks throughout as I thoroughly enjoyed this riveting, suspenseful read.
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