Tell Me My Name by Amy Reed

Unique, interesting, poetic. Also confusing as hell.

This YA 2021 dystopian novel is certainly an odd one. Its main character’s name is Fern, an 18-year-old who lives on the wealthy Commodore Island. She has two dads and a pet that she cares about, but she doesn’t have many friends or any ambitions besides wishing for her childhood best friend to return her romantic feelings, and even these feelings are dull and fleeting. She feels invisible, unmotivated, and unimportant. This is until she gets a new neighbor named Ivy, a young star seeking rehabilitation, who turns her world on its axis forever.

When you read this book, it puts you in a trance—and not necessarily a good one, since everything about and within this novel is pretty terrible. The mega-capitalistic world, the rash, blunt dialogue, and the bland, almost soulless characters, especially through Fern’s outwardly apathetic yet to her core validation-seeking perspective, can be almost unbearable to take in. In all of these characters—in the insecure Fern, the troubled, danger-seeking Ivy, the overly acceptant Ash, or the cruel, bitter Tami—we are faced with the worst qualities about humankind, and we see the most unpleasant things about ourselves reflected back at us. It’s a hazy, messy, existential crisis of a book, and it represents feelings of lostness and hopelessness so well through Amy Reed’s almost poetic prose throughout.

That being said, I feel like the beauty of the writing fights to balance out the blandness or straight up unpleasantness of nearly all of our characters, with the exception of maybe Ivy (from the first three quarters of the book), who are the worst part of the book by far. The author was clearly inspired by The Great Gatsby in writing this novel, which is always cool to see. She creates and crafts a plot quite similar to a gender-flipped version of Gatsby. But Gatsby’s characters were much more fleshed out and complex, as opposed to reading about these three or four shallow rich kids living out their lives so apathetically that it’s… just kind of boring more than anything else, even in its most intense moments.

But also, maybe that’s the point? I’m not exactly sure.

In all honesty, I’m not sure about much of anything about this book—what exactly about Gatsby inspired the author to write it, what the characters’ motives were, what it was trying to express or why—but I found myself caught up in its world and its mysteries nevertheless. It touches on a lot of issues very vaguely without diving much into them, giving readers room to ponder their significance in the text. Ivy and Fern’s relationship was the most interesting dynamic, I thought, especially near the end where we get a bit of a plot twist.

The book certainly serves as a major critique on wealth in an interesting way. The access the wealthy characters have in this novel is endless, yet they are endlessly unhappy and bored with their lives. The setting is an almost devastatingly sad, ultra-capitalist cesspool where all people are segregated by wealth. I thought that was an interesting choice, but I do wish the theme was developed just a little bit more to give the book some explicit purpose and direction.

Without spoiling, I will also say the novel also borders on a bit of cli-fi, which I loved because I wasn’t expecting that at all. I liked how this added to the dystopian aspects of the book as well.

Interesting twists and turns and a super creative setting, but for me, the writing style itself is much more interesting than anything the plot or the characters have to offer. But I’d say Tell Me My Name pretty enjoyable overall, though I didn’t love the ending—it was much too confusing and vague, unfortunately.

3/5