Love is the Drug

Johnson, Alaya Dawn. Love is the Drug. 2014. 352p. ISBN 9780545417815. Available as an audiobook on Overdrive.

Emily Bird has the perfect life. An African-American, she attends a great private school, her parents are well off, and she has the best boyfriend. But not everything is at it seems. Emily’s mother controls every aspect of her life. Her boyfriend doesn’t really love her, nor does she him. Her parents are always involved in secretive work for the government. And there’s this boy, Coffee, who Emily finds herself attractive to even though he’s a drug dealer, white, and a foreigner from Brazil.

But when she wakes up in a hospital eight days after going to a party and doesn’t recall a thing, she knows something wrong has happened. All she remembers is mentioning a secret company name she once saw something to a man called Roosevelt David, who supposedly works for Homeland Security, and with whom her boyfriend Paul hopes to land an internship. She also recalls that Coffee sprinted after her when Paul took her away that night. The rest is emptiness.

At the same time, international events lead to a war between the United States and Venezuela, and a pandemic, supposedly released by bio-terrorists supported by the South American country, begins to kill thousands of Americans.

As the country falls under martial law and people die in droves, Emily is convinced that she knows something, that Roosevelt wiped her memory of that night to keep her quiet. With her world unravelling around her, Emily must become Bird, emanticipate herself from her mother, and discover the true about her and Coffee, and the secret she doesn’t remember that could bring down the largest conspiracy in the history of the United States.