ONE OF TIME'S MUST-READ BOOKS OF 2024 NAMED A VOGUE BEST BOOK OF 2024 ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE READS OF SUMMER 2024 "Adventurous. . .gritty and refreshingly girl-centric. . . lingers in the imagination." –The New York Times “Ko…draws characters with such deftness that they feel wholly alive." –The Washington Post "It belongs to an American literary tradition that includes Dana Spiotta, George Saunders, and their patron saint, Don DeLillo." –The Atlantic The award-winning author of The Leavers offers a visionary novel of friendship, art, and ambition that asks: What is the value of a meaningful life? In the early 1980s, Giselle Chin, Jackie Ong, and Ellen Ng are three teenagers drawn together by their shared sense of alienation and desire for something different. “Allied in the weirdest parts of themselves,” they envision each other as artistic collaborators and embark on a future defined by freedom and creativity. By the time they are adults, their dreams are murkier. As a performance artist, Giselle must navigate an elite social world she never conceived of. As a coder thrilled by the internet’s early egalitarian promise, Jackie must contend with its more sinister shift toward monetization and surveillance. And as a community activist, Ellen confronts the increasing gentrification and policing overwhelming her New York City neighborhood. Over time their friendship matures and changes, their definitions of success become complicated, and their sense of what matters evolves. Moving from the predigital 1980s to the art and tech subcultures of the 1990s to a strikingly imagined portrait of the 2040s, Memory Piece is an innovative and audacious story of three lifelong friends as they strive to build satisfying lives in a world that turns out to be radically different from the one they were promised.

The description of Lisa Ko's new novel is a bit misleading. What was sold as a journey of the friendship of three teens is more a story told in three parts about how these women move through their worlds trying to make change and realizing how ephemeral that change is. That's not our criticism of the book. Ko has a clear theme and follows Giselle (a performance artist), Jackie (a software developer), and Ellen (an activist and community organizer) in turn at different points in time as they work and struggle with their values and accomplishments. Each character works very hard to express a value in the world (Giselle - her work, Jackie - her community, Ellen - her squat house) and each struggles with what it means to be misunderstood or forgotten. At the same time, Ko creates an interesting circle of admiration and resentment between the three women. They each believably think the other two are much cooler and recontextualize their own lives on the ideal form they imagine of the others. The issue is that some of the worldbuilding choices that Ko makes to power this story don't work. Giselle's art is alright but it doesn't have the power that would reflect her actual success. Jackie's story makes more sense, but the stakes of her conflict (whether she was a whistleblower that brought down her day job) aren't that compelling. But the biggest issue is Ellen's story. Ko takes us into a future New York City that's wracked by climate change, income inequality, and a surveillance state that makes no sense. You can see what an entirely gig-economied hyper-watched society is thematically appropriate for Ellen's value context, but it just isn't in any way believable and it makes the last third of the book weak. By the end, we were even sure what Ko's point was -- what exactly was Giselle's last project and how does it relate to all the suffering we saw Ellen go through? Memory Piece isn't a terrible book. There are good sections in it and Ko works her theme consistently. But the end of the book is just so weak that NUBClub can't recommend it to you wholeheartedly.