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FictionLiterary FictionFamily Saga

Real Americans

Review by Thane Tierney

It’s the mid-1960s, right at the start of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, and the Red Guards are methodically upending—many would say demolishing—the cultural heritage of China. Books are burned, artifacts are smashed, history is erased. But two plucky biology students, Mei and Peng, are determined to rescue a lotus seed from the university library. 

This isn’t just any seed. It is a seed from thousands of years ago, allegedly dropped from the sky by a dragon as a gift for a long-ago emperor, with the power to confer a wish on its recipient.  But the emperor died before getting to make that wish. Mei, a scientist by nature, is skeptical of the legend, but she wants to protect the seed from the Red Guards, so she takes it.

Here, Rachel Khong’s multigenerational saga Real Americans splits into three narratives, following Mei, her daughter and her grandson through 60-odd tumultuous years after she immigrates to America. The narration isn’t linear; Mei, who plays the pivotal role at the book’s brief outset, largely recedes into the background until the final third of the book, when, as an elderly retired geneticist, she reflects on her life choices and how they have affected her family: “Aren’t we lucky? Our DNA encodes for innumerable possible people, and yet it’s you and I who are here. . . . In this place, on this small blue rock, innumerable miracles: redwoods, computers, stingrays, pianos, you and me.” 

Through intervening events and discoveries, Khong implicitly asks a very pertinent question: What does it mean to be a “real American”? Is it enough to be born in the U.S.? Can you assimilate from a foreign country, a foreign culture? Is there something in our genetics that binds us inevitably to the lands of our ancestral origins? Real Americans’ answers are at once complex and compelling, as science and philosophy sit cheek by jowl with history and elements of magic. As the three narrative strands merge, their denouement is unexpected yet perhaps predestined: the fruit of a seed planted long ago. 

In Rachel Khong’s multigenerational saga, Real Americans, science and philosophy sit cheek by jowl with history and elements of magic.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

Long Island

Review by Melissa Brown

A knock at the door can change everything. Such a small, everyday act can have enormous power to set off a chain of events one would never have considered possible.

Long Island by Colm Toibin revisits Eilis Lacey more than 20 years after the events of his 2009 novel, Brooklyn, which introduced readers to this self-possessed, elusive young woman. She now has a daughter and a son who are almost grown, and sends their pictures to her mother in monthly letters. Then, a knock at the door upends Eilis’ marriage to Tony Fiorello. The revelation of his indiscretions drives her back to Enniscorthy, Ireland, to avoid the coming fallout and also to celebrate her mother’s 80th birthday. While there, she inevitably crosses paths again with Jim Farrell, the love she left behind all those years before. Jim is still unmarried, though he is secretly courting Eilis’s friend Nancy, who is now a widow. The last time Eilis left Brooklyn for Ireland, after her sister Rose’s death, Tony was so worried she wouldn’t return that they married before she sailed away. Now, Tony must wonder again if she’ll come back to him. As in Brooklyn, Eilis makes her own decisions and thus makes her own life.

A close observer of human nature, Toibin writes with great depth of longing, teasing out even the smallest interactions so that the reader feels the moment’s wistfulness or indecision keenly. No gesture or sigh escapes his notice. Toibin’s dialogue captures a wealth of feeling, but often it is what is unsaid, contained in the pauses, that grips the reader’s attention. We hold our breath as Eilis and Jim and Nancy make their plans and promises. Long Island is purely character driven, which may not thrill readers who prefer a faster pace. In its compelling interiority, though, there is plenty of beauty to savor.

Long Island revisits Eilis Lacey more than 20 years after the events of Colm Toibin’s 2009 novel, Brooklyn, which introduced readers to this self-possessed, elusive young woman.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Blue Ruin

Review by Michael Magras

A well-stocked bookstore would have no trouble filling an entire section with novels about art and artists, from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray to Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye. Even connoisseurs of art-themed fiction, however, are unlikely to have encountered a protagonist like Jay Gates, the down-on-his-luck artist at the center of Hari Kunzru’s brilliant new novel, Blue Ruin. For anyone who has tried their hand at creating art, Blue Ruin offers satisfying criticisms of the capricious industry’s spotty record of anointing winners and losers.

Jay is a British man of Jamaican ancestry in his 40s, who was once a promising art student. At the start of the novel, he’s a COVID-19 survivor and undocumented immigrant in upstate New York, sleeping in his beat-up car and eking out a living by delivering groceries.

On one delivery to a craftsman cottage overlooking a lake at the end of a mile-long driveway, the masked person awaiting his arrival turns out to be Alice, a woman who was briefly Jay’s girlfriend in art school. Alice left Jay for his best friend, Rob, and Alice and Rob have now been married for 15 years. After Jay collapses from fatigue, Alice invites him to stay in a barn on the property until he recovers. Also isolating there are Marshal, Rob’s gallerist, who espouses conspiracy theories and calls COVID-19 “a Chinese bioweapon”; and Nicole, Marshal’s 20-something “trophy girlfriend.”

Coincidence is a dangerous narrative tool to mess around with, but Kunzru pulls it off in Blue Ruin thanks to the subtle characterizations and intricate layers with which he expands his premise. Buried resentments and jettisoned ambitions come to the fore as Kunzru explores themes of racism, opportunism and the inequities of privilege and hardship. The result is an exceptional work that finds new variations on the familiar chestnut that people aren’t always what they seem.

For anyone who has tried their hand at creating art, Hari Kunzru’s brilliant new novel, Blue Ruin, offers satisfying criticisms of the capricious industry’s spotty record of anointing winners and losers.
FictionLiterary FictionComing of Age

Bad Habit

Review by Laura Sackton

In her first work to be translated into English, Spanish poet, playwright and author Alana S. Portero captures the complexities of trans girlhood and adolescence. Set in the working-class San Blas neighborhood of Madrid in the 1980s and 1990s, Bad Habit, is full of chaotic, messy, vibrant life. The unnamed protagonist, a trans girl who possesses an unshakable knowledge of herself but lacks a way to express it safely, has a singular first-person narrative voice. Her campy humor, biting observations and poetic musings will leave a lasting impression on readers.

Portero balances long, meaty passages of self-reflection with vivid scenes grounded in sensory detail. The resulting mix reads like a fictional memoir, a woman baring her soul with a wink. It even follows the expected beats of a coming-of-age memoir: the protagonist’s childhood and early realization that her gender is at odds with how the world sees her; her first bittersweet experience of love; her teenage exploits in Madrid’s downtown party scene; her painful attempts to blockade herself in the closet; her tentative forays into trans life.

Portero writes about the intersections of gender, sex, desire and longing—intersections that collide in the body—with incredible thoughtfulness and nuance. She also beautifully portrays trans sisterhood and found family. Many trans women play important roles in the protagonist’s life, often in surprising and unpredictable ways. These women are lonely, crass, loving, tough and each distinct. The care they give one another radiates off the page, even, and especially, when the narrative gets grim.

Sometimes Mara Faye Lethem’s translation feels a bit clunky; occasional oddly constructed sentences may take a moment to untangle. But this hardly matters, because the prose overall is so fresh. The protagonist’s ability to see herself and the people in her life both up close and from a distance is irresistible. Bad Habit is queer fiction at its painful, honest, celebratory best, rejoicing in the beauty of trans lives while simultaneously acknowledging the violence that the world too often thrusts upon them.

The campy humor, biting observations and poetic musings of Bad Habit’s heroine will leave a lasting impression on readers. This is queer fiction at its painful, honest, celebratory best.
FictionLiterary Fiction

All Fours

Review by Cat Acree

Menopause is profoundly misunderstood and misrepresented, in part because the generations who’ve been through it aren’t, generally speaking, inclined to talk publicly about it. Only in the last decade or two have people so openly discussed infertility and miscarriages. Perhaps we can hope that once this younger generation enters perimenopause, it will no longer feel like such a mystifying hormonal event horizon. But so far, there have been few works of contemporary fiction about menopause, and even fewer that are as erotic and funny as All Fours, the first novel from artist, filmmaker and author Miranda July in nearly a decade.

July’s protagonist is an unnamed artist with intentionally clear ties to July’s own identity, and the plot is described simply enough: The artist plans to drive across the country from Los Angeles to New York City, leaving her husband and child for several weeks. Instead, she stops at a motel a mere 30 minutes from her home. Beginning with an expensive and exquisite redesign of her motel room, followed by a charged relationship with a guy who works at Hertz, she sets out on a no-holds-barred pursuit of desire, selfhood, sex and liberation.

A character arc is typically shaped by an incendiary realization, but July’s artist experiences such revelations on a weekly, if not daily, basis. She holds a misconception, she unlearns it, she reframes and continues on. This process—truly, the cyclical experience of having a curious brain—allows the artist’s mind to feel like your own. It also structures All Fours like a classic quest narrative, as new emotional and sexual adventures open up after each sequence of self-discovery.

The cover of All Fours is an image of a cliff by Albert Bierstadt, a 19th-century German American painter who’s known for his lush Western landscapes. Bierstadt’s cliff is shadowed and steep, and from the valley below bursts a golden light so intense that it washes out the trees, the clouds and anything that might be in the distance. For many women, menopause is that cliff: dangerous, distant and a bit unreal. July’s protagonist hurtles toward that cliff inelegantly and imperfectly but, as much as she possibly can, honestly—and that commitment to honesty at the expense of normalcy is what makes this book queer. The cost of the “unconventional” life she seeks is significant; look at the conversations that must be had, the choices that must be made to disrupt the status quo in favor of living truthfully. Her unmasking and remaking are incendiary, but also, look how hard she holds on to what she loves most: her family, her connections, her spark.

Because there is no end to her quest (that’d be death, the real cliff), there can be no victory, but All Fours is undeniably victorious.

There have been few works of contemporary fiction about menopause, and even fewer that are as erotic and funny as All Fours, the first novel from artist, filmmaker and author Miranda July in nearly a decade.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Until August

Review by Yi Jiang

On the same day each August, Ana Magdalena Bach travels by ferry to a Caribbean island, in order to lay a gladiolus bouquet on her mother’s grave. Afterwards, she spends the night in the same hotel overlooking a lagoon inhabited by blue herons. Against an evocative backdrop of jungles and beaches, this pilgrimage remains unvarying for eight years, until the opening of Gabriel García Márquez’s Until August, when Ana Magdalena makes the startling decision to have a one-night stand with a stranger. Upon each subsequent trip to the island, she seeks out a different man, embarking on a series of strange, often fraught affairs.  

García Márquez worked on Until August in his final years as dementia increasingly eroded his ability to write. Its publication comes a decade after his death, and García Márquez’s sons admit in the book’s preface that the Nobel laureate himself said, “This book doesn’t work. It must be destroyed.” But upon returning to the drafts years later, his sons believed the book to be better than García Márquez had judged, and decided that it was worthy of publication. 

Indeed, this novella, and its crisp translation by Anne McLean, avoids the disappointment of many other infamous posthumous releases from canonical authors. Part of its success can be credited to editor Cristóbal Pera’s care in piecing together García Márquez’s drafts and annotations. Although lacking the intoxicating complexity of García Márquez’s most famous works, Until August echoes the elegant mastery of time and change that propelled novels such as One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera into greatness. 

Each year brings lush depictions of change on the island—with its impoverished villages and shining tourist resorts—and in Ana Magdalena. Few novelists, even in their prime, are capable of matching the steady control and organic surprise García Márquez mixes into the evolution of Ana Magdalena’s marriage and family life back on the mainland. There is a quality of immediacy in every action in Until August, and readers will feel the thudding swings of emotion as a shout causes a silence that “remained vitrified for several days in the air of the house,” or Ana Magdalena watches a lover who sleeps looking “like an enormous orphan.” 

This brief offering delivers graceful insight into the fickle human heart, serving as an absorbing—if quiet—epilogue to García Márquez’s towering oeuvre.

This posthumous novella delivers graceful insight into the fickle human heart, serving as an absorbing—if quiet—epilogue to García Márquez’s towering oeuvre.
FictionSpeculative FictionLiterary FictionDystopian Fiction

I Cheerfully Refuse

Review by Mariel Fechik

“Here at the beginning it must be said the End was on everyone’s mind,” opens Leif Enger’s fourth novel, I Cheerfully Refuse. In an unspecified near-future, as civilization slowly tips off a cliff’s edge, Rainy and his bookselling wife, Lark, eke out a cautious yet relatively tranquil life in a small community on the shore of Lake Superior. “Quixotes,” Lark calls the pair. “By which she meant not always sensible.”

When Lark brings home her favorite poet’s rare, unpublished manuscript, Kellan, the fugitive who gave her the book, comes with her and becomes their attic boarder. Though Lark and Rainy grow fond of Kellan, they’re uneasy about his past. Then Kellan disappears, heralding a violent sea change in their quiet lives. Kellan had warned of a ruthless pursuer, and when Lark becomes collateral damage in the chase, Rainy’s quixotic existence shatters.

Hounded by grief and the looming shadow of whoever was after Kellan, Rainy boards a tumbledown sailboat and takes to the lake. Soon, he is alone on Lake Superior with minimal sailing knowledge, and only Lark’s beloved manuscript and primal fear for company. He becomes a sort of Great Lakes Odysseus, sailing over a wine-dark sea toward the idea of his wife, and encountering no sea monsters, but instead finding fractious kingdoms and corpses rising from warming waters.

The novel’s ruined world, marked by book burnings, anti-intellectual sentiment, environmental disruption and casual brutality, will feel entirely too plausible for readers. Yet within its dystopian landscape, Enger’s story incorporates fabulism in the most traditional sense, featuring a serpentine quest, a rare and ancient tome, and even a bridge troll. As in the most memorable fables, I Cheerfully Refuse’s fantastical elements heighten the emotional impact of its depiction of violence and grief, elevating the entire narrative.

“I think the sea has no in-between: you get either rage and wayward lightning . . . or such freehanded beauty that time contracts,” Rainy observes early in his journey. Like the turbulent lake, I Cheerfully Refuse is filled with polarities that should contradict but somehow, instead, cohere: hopeless moments infused with light and shocking acts of cruelty depicted through beautiful, memorable prose. Although the struggle to survive leaves room for little else, Rainy still finds delight in simple, ordinary things: the post-storm sun or a ripe tomato. It’s in these moments of earnest wonder that I Cheerfully Refuse is most compelling, like the brief but glorious clearing of a tempestuous sky.

It’s in moments of earnest wonder that Leif Enger’s I Cheerfully Refuse is most compelling, like the brief but glorious clearing of a tempestuous sky.
FictionSpeculative FictionLiterary Fiction

The Morningside

Review by Michael Magras

Téa Obreht’s satisfyingly unsettling new novel, The Morningside, takes place in the near future, in an East Coast city that resembles New York. Eleven-year-old Silvia and her mother have traveled to Island City after their home was destroyed by flooding. They move into a 100-year-old building called the Morningside, that, like Island City, has seen better days. Silvia and other refuge-seekers have been brought in by the federal Repopulation Program to help revitalize the place.

The building superintendent is Silvia’s Aunt Ena, a woman who is “short, loud, and incredibly ill-practiced at speaking to eleven-year-old nieces.” A marvelous character, Ena has an unfortunate tendency to share details about the farm the family once lived on, details that Silvia’s mother would prefer to keep secret. She also fills Silvia in on Bezi Duras, the mysterious resident of the 33rd floor penthouse. Silvia begins to suspect that Bezi is not just an eccentric painter with an elaborate orchard but also a Vila, a vindictive mountain spirit. Her suspicions grow when light bulbs spontaneously burst and water pipes begin “spurting sulfurously” after a curious Silvia tries to break into Bezi’s apartment.

That’s just the start of the strange dealings. With finely calibrated assurance, Obreht develops a sense of unease that is compounded by an underground radio transmission known as the Drowned City Dispatch, large animals rumored to be “men during the day and dogs at night,” a friend who lures Silvia into nighttime escapades, and the possibility that a killer may be in their midst.

The ending is too neat, but The Morningside soars in its depiction of an alternative world frighteningly similar to our own. Whether or not they ever face forcible displacement in their life, everyone at some point must confront their past. Obreht addresses this truism with startling freshness in this entertaining work.

Téa Obreht’s latest novel, The Morningside, soars in its depiction of an alternative world frighteningly similar to our own.
FictionShort StoriesLiterary Fiction

Table for Two

Review by Eric A. Ponce

You can learn a lot about someone by getting dinner with them. At a small table, in the glow of candlelight, you might find yourself connecting with a new acquaintance as if they were an old friend. In Table for Two, the new collection of stories from beloved novelist Amor Towles, that level of intimacy is reached and at times exceeded. Towles presents his protagonists with such a high degree of detail that readers will feel like they know the characters personally. While this is the hallmark of any good fiction, Towles elevates these stories further by setting them in complex political landscapes and amid moral quagmires. The result is a masterful, subtle collection of thoroughly entertaining stories.

One choice that distinguishes this collection is its geographical organization. Towles begins with six stories that take place in New York City. The first of these, “The Line,” actually opens in rural Russia, where our “hero,” Pushkin, lives an idyllic life. However, after the Bolshevik revolution, his wife, Irina, insists that they move to Moscow. From there, through many winding twists of fate, the couple ends up in New York City, far away from their feudal beginnings and their Communist awakenings. The five following stories take place in the New York of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, displaying the city at its wealthiest through characters trying to take some of that wealth for themselves. The second half of the book is a novella set in early 20th century Los Angeles, capturing a unique time in the city’s history when financial success coupled with an increasingly seedy underground laid the foundation for LA to become one of the largest, most diverse cities in the United States.

The most engaging, artful part of Table for Two, however, is the unique ability Towles has to approach his characters simultaneously through authorial intervention and through getting inside their heads. Frequently, Towles writes about the characters as though he and they know what is going to happen, or as though they know what the moral of their story is. Rather than spoiling the plot or coming off as heavy-handed, this technique allows readers to fully engage in the stories, pushing them to consider for themselves: What does success mean? What lengths would you go to for money? What does it mean to be happy with your life? Towles forces the reader and his characters to address these questions, and the answers you find in this book will move you.

Amor Towles’ latest, Table for Two, is a masterful, subtle collection of thoroughly entertaining stories.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

Glorious Exploits

Review by Thane Tierney

At its heart, Ferdia Lennon’s debut novel, Glorious Exploits, is something of a Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney let’s-put-on-a-show romp . . . with a few minor, and mind-bending, exceptions. The stars are a pair of foul-mouthed unemployed potters from Syracuse, Sicily, the year is 412 BC and the acting troupe isn’t a bunch of neighborhood kids; it’s composed of Athenian prisoners of war left in a quarry to starve.

The tale’s narrator, Lampo, is a garrulous scoundrel always on the lookout for spare coin. One day, after tossing scraps of food to the Athenian prisoners in exchange for their reciting passages from Euripides, Lampo’s more taciturn friend Gelon presents him with a plan: reinvent themselves as directors, recruit the prisoners as a cast, tart up the prison quarry as their amphitheater and present two of Euripides’ plays, Medea and Trojan Women, back to back.

What could possibly go wrong? Apart, of course, from the fact that the potential audience of Syracusans hates the defeated Athenians, and that the production is to be mounted by two unemployed potters with no background in theater. Nonetheless, the show must go on; the hapless duo happens upon a mysterious benefactor who offers funds for the production, sets are built, costumes are sewn and various potentially hazardous wheels are set in motion.

At the outset of rehearsals, co-director Gelon gives his captive cast a little pep talk. He reminisces about how the Athenian tragedy Oedipus Rex sparked his fondness for the theater: “I don’t hate you. How could I? Even though I know you came to make us slaves. I can’t hate you. I believe any city that gave us those plays has something worth saving.”

If politics makes strange bedfellows, then Glorious Exploits reveals that art makes even stranger ones, as the captors and the captives pause their hostilities for the sake of a greater—if imperfect—good. Lennon’s unique voice sparkles with a darkly comic undertone in this quirkily uplifting commentary on war, art and the surprisingly resilient spirit of humanity.

Ferdia Lennon’s unique voice sparkles with a darkly comic undertone in his debut novel, Glorious Exploits, a quirkily uplifting commentary on war, art and the surprisingly resilient spirit of humanity.
FictionLiterary FictionFamily Drama

The Limits

Review by Freya Sachs

Pia’s divorced parents live disparate lives: Her mother is a marine biologist, diving to explore coastal reefs and track the impact of humans on the oceans of French Polynesia; her father is a New York City doctor with a large apartment in Manhattan, caring for patients in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. He has just gotten remarried to Kate, a teacher who finds herself confounded by remote teaching. When Pia returns to live with her father in Manhattan, she has a new relationship to build with Kate, even while she carries a secret with her from her time in Tahiti with her mother.

At each turn, the characters in Nell Freudenberger’s The Limits discover themselves to be connected more complexly than they knew. From New York City to a Zoom screen, from a hospital full of early COVID-19 cases to an island off the coast of Tahiti, Freudenberger brings the anxieties and challenges of the early pandemic days to vivid, engaging life.

The characters have full and fascinating inner lives, and real concerns—parenthood, a spreading virus, preserving the natural world—that layer with their interpersonal conflicts. Each chapter shifts our focus, holding our attention on one place and perspective before turning to reveal relationships from a new angle. The novel addresses race, class, education and access without coming off as heavy-handed; it feels reflective of how circumstance determines our real-world choices.

One of the unique strengths of Freudenberger’s writing is how she integrates science—as she did with physics in 2019’s Lost and Wanted—in engaging, relevant ways. In The Limits, Freudenberger deftly employs the questions posed by climate change, seafloor mining and the struggle of modern medicine in the face of the unknown to shape the story.

One of the unique strengths of Nell Freudenberger’s writing is how she integrates science in engaging, relevant ways, from the questions posed by climate change to seafloor mining to the struggle of modern medicine in the face of the unknown.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Wild Houses

Review by Arlene McKanic

In this reviewer’s (possibly prejudiced) view, there are few things as satisfying as a good work of Irish literature. The form doesn’t matter too much; a poem, a short story, a play, even a novel that makes no sense—looking at you, Finnegan’s Wake. A genius Irish writer can, in the words of the Irish playwright J.M. Synge, make the English language “as fully flavoured as a nut or apple.” Such is the case with Colin Barrett’s first novel, Wild Houses.

The setup is straightforward: Dev Hendrick lives alone in County Mayo with his late mother’s yappy little dog, Georgie. One rainy Friday night, Dev’s cousins, Gabe and Sketch Ferdia, drag a teenager to Dev’s home and expect Dev to hide him. The teenager, Donal “Doll” English, is the brother of Cillian, a petty drug dealer who owes the Ferdias—or their drug lord boss—money. Cillian will get Doll back if he coughs up the cash by Monday.

Certainly, the situation ratchets up the reader’s anxiety, to say nothing of that of Doll’s mother, Sheila, and his sensible girlfriend, Nicky. These are the folks who take it upon themselves to find a lot of money in not a lot of time. Ironically, Cillian did once have what he owes, but it was washed away by a turlough, a temporary lake that, according to him, only happens in West Ireland.

But if you come for the nail-biting plot, you’ll stay for Barrett’s gorgeous language. Consider such phrases as this description of a TV: “its screen patinaed in a fuzz of glinting dust.” The sagging nets of a derelict tennis court are “as frayed as used dental floss.” Gabe Ferdia has “a face on him like a vandalised church.” And so on. Barrett, author of the short story collections Young Skins and Homesickness, treats the sketchiest of his characters with tenderness and compassion. Wild Houses is a stunning work.

Come to Wild Houses for the nail-biting plot; stay for Colin Barrett’s gorgeous language: Here, tennis court nets are “as frayed as used dental floss” and a man has “a face on him like a vandalised church.”
FictionLiterary FictionDystopian FictionComing of Age

Memory Piece

Review by Laura Sackton

In her first novel since her National Book Award-longlisted debut, The Leavers, Lisa Ko explores memory, art, technology and consumption through the eyes of three childhood best friends. Jackie, Ellen and Giselle meet at Chinese school in suburban New Jersey in the 1980s. Though they come from different backgrounds and have divergent interests, they’re drawn together by a shared desire to make something more—or different—of their lives. Moving from the dot-com era and early tech culture of the 1990s to a highly militarized vision of New York City in the 2040s, Memory Piece traces the ways the three women’s lives converge and diverge.

Giselle turns to art, launching her career with an experimental performance piece in which she lives for a year in a hidden room in a mall. As she becomes more immersed in the art world, she begins to question her motives and desires, floundering through a life that is sometimes more display than substance. Jackie gets caught up in the early days of the internet, working for a tech startup by day and developing her own radical projects by night. Ellen becomes an activist in college, and devotes her life to community organizing and fighting against the gentrification threatening her home. 

The novel’s three distinct sections drive home just how differently Giselle, Jackie and Ellen engage with and react to the world—and each other—as everything changes around them. Jackie’s section is full of frenetic energy, while Giselle’s is dreamy and quiet: Her voice comes through at a remove, as if she’s narrating from a distance. Ellen’s section is poignant with loss and nostalgia. Throughout, Ko’s prose is beautiful and sharp, and her ability to shapeshift through a range of tones makes the novel a pleasure to read.

A bittersweet wistfulness permeates the whole of Memory Piece. Though Giselle, Jackie and Ellen remain important to one another throughout their lives, there is a separateness to each of the novel’s sections that gives it a meandering and melancholy feel. This is a compelling, often chilling and beautifully observant novel about what connects us to, and disconnects us from, each other.

Moving from the dot com era and early tech culture of the 1990s to a highly militarized vision of New York City in the 2040s, Memory Piece traces the ways three women’s lives converge and diverge.

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