Publisher's Weekly Review
Ko (The Leavers) spans past, present, and future with the astute story of three Chinese American women from the New York City tristate area over the course of their lives. As a teen in 1980s suburbia, Giselle Chin knows she wants to be an artist, and that her performance art will provide "a container for the uncertainty and overwhelm of the future." At Chinese language school, she meets Jackie Ong, who's drawn to computers and feels "more kinship to machines" than people. At a party, the two encounter Ellen Ng, who later gets involved in political activism and moves to a community squat in New York City called Sola. As Giselle gains fame in the art world, she wonders whether celebrity will compromise her true vision, and if so, which one she'll have to abandon. Jackie, too, must decide what really matters to her as she attempts to balance integrity and success while creating an online social network just as the internet begins to take off, and Ellen worries Sola will be undone by gentrification. For much of the narrative, the women's individual story lines feel a bit disjointed, but Ko brings them together in a satisfying final act in the 2040s, when America is an authoritarian police state. This is a worthy follow-up to Ko's striking debut. Agent: Ayesha Pande, Pande Literary. (Mar.)
Guardian Review
The first section of Lisa Ko's novel follows a Chinese-American artist, Giselle Chin, who in 1996 begins a durational work called Memory Piece: she writes down her memories for seven hours a day, for a year - and at the end she burns the lot. But in Memory Piece, the book, the documenting of life becomes something precious and worth preserving. The novel is itself a kind of archival resource, odd photographs and records interspersed between accounts of the lives of Giselle and her childhood pals Jackie Ong and Ellen Ng. Their friendship develops as the story unfolds, sometimes blooming, sometimes growing thorns, and there is real pleasure in seeing each character through the eyes of the others in turn. The first section sees Giselle finding success as a young performance artist in New York in the 1980s, while Jackie's section follows her negotiation of a booming tech industry in the late 1990s; she develops a blogging platform where people can publish "a personal, public, digital archive of one's own life". Ko then takes a conceptual leap forward, to the 2040s and a full dystopia, where the now 71-year-old Ellen is forced to abandon her beloved activist housing co-op in Manhattan, when it's slated for redevelopment, and must flee to a hand-to-mouth existence in a rundown area of the Bronx. Gentrification on steroids has divided the US into wealthy enclaves ringed by security, and deprived encampments beyond; fascists are in power, surveillance is absolute and movement, communications and resources are restricted (unless you're rich). What's recorded - and what can be shared - is tightly controlled; even trying to remember a different world becomes a radical, dangerous act. This is Ko's second novel, following 2018's The Leavers, and she writes with a cool, collected intelligence and is unafraid to wrangle big ideas. Her characters continually weigh personal integrity against success, wealth, comfort, even safety. Giselle and Jackie cling to idealism within lives that disappoint: Giselle sees through the wealth, gatekeeping and phoniness of the art world; Jackie loses faith in the democratic promise of the internet as the potential to track and monetise users becomes apparent. The novel's three-part structure cleverly reveals how the nastier sides of both scenes feed a future of stark economic divisions and hyper-surveillance. That said, I did struggle with the gear shift into the extremely bleak 2040s. It's a stylistic jolt: up to that point, Ko deploys an elegant, almost stately pace of third-person narration, offering crystal-sharp depictions of two specific industries and a New York of the past. In the third part we're in a much more jittery first-person account from Ellen. The anxiety hums off the page, but the world-building is harder to deliver in first person, and there are occasionally awkward exposition dumps. The doomcasting does, however, much expand the palette and scope of this ambitious book. Towards the end, there are tantalising hints that the friends develop an archive, documenting how people used to live: a resource to help "continue the story and imagine another" - and a breath of hope to close on.
Kirkus Review
Three girls walk into a bedroom in the New Jersey suburbs in 1983...and many decades later, into a dystopian future. Soon-to-be seventh graders Giselle Chin and Jackie Ong are hiding from a Fourth of July party, making prank calls in the host's bedroom, when Ellen Ng walks in and asks if there's anything else to do for fun around here. The three wander across the street into a parallel gathering and help themselves to someone else's hamburgers. "This was the beginning, what Giselle would describe, years later...as...the SEEDS of our aesthetics...we saw each other for who we were // masked weirdos, undercover pranksters." This ominously pretentious-sounding observation appears in one of the year-long conceptual artworks Giselle eventually becomes famous for: Mall Piece, 1995-96; Memory Piece, 1996-97; and Death Piece, 1999-2000. Meanwhile, Jackie grows up to be a visionary software developer, creating a site where people keep online diaries for public consumption and taking part in New York City's Silicon Alley dot-com boom. Ellen continues her rabble-rousing ways, publishing a zine and then establishing a squat on the Lower East Side. Though they lose track of each other from time to time, the three come to realize that "friendships were circular, that you could never fully lose touch." After moving their stories across the bridge to the new millennium, the narrative leaps ahead to the 2040s, where the political situation has become a nightmare, though not a particularly intriguing one, and supporting characters proliferate while ones we care about fade from view. Though full of interesting action and sharp observation, Ko's follow-up to The Leavers (2017) fails to whip up much narrative tension beyond the mystery created by the photographs that appear from time to time, captioned with complicated archival labels. In the end, the book's elaborate conceptual structure dominates the characters who inhabit it. A socially conscious novel of art and ideas. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Bored and alone, three Asian American girls stumble upon one other at a Fourth of July barbecue in 1983. As the world proves tough and overbearing, their paths continue to intersect in brief but unforgettable moments. The award-winning author of The Leavers (2017) takes readers through the 1980s to the 2040s in New York, often interweaving art and technology. The first part of the book centers on Giselle Chin, a performance artist who struggles with the harsh expectations of the greater art world as she gains recognition. Then there's the sharp and charismatic Jackie Ong, a pioneer of the dot-com era--until she discovers the dark side of monetization and data collection. Meanwhile, Ellen Ng starts a squat in her community to fight gentrification and policing. But in a bleak future, she wonders if her efforts even matter. The novel serves as an archive of our past and a vision for what's to come, hauntingly beautiful in a way that's both nostalgic and dystopian. In essence, Memory Piece is about the power of remembering, especially when it's painful.