Lisa Ko

audio fiction (9 hrs 39 min - I only got to 1 hr 28 min)
I sort of like the writing style, and the narration is excellent, but Giselle's character annoys the crap out of me. I was hoping she'd grow out of her teenage angsty emo-ness in time, but nope, she really does aspire to nothing more than performance art. If she were a real person I would not be friends with her, or at least would not enjoy spending a lot of time with her.

Maybe I could try another book from this author, but an hour and a half is a long enough time for me to give up on this one.… (more)

Three Chinese-American girls meet in weekend language school in the nineties and, as the years pass, one becomes an artist, one a tech entrepreneur and one a community activist, but they continue to move in and out of each others lives, through the present and into the future.

I was really looking forward to this book. I enjoyed Lisa Ko's debut novel, The Leavers and anticipated that her vision of these women's lives in the future and the world they inhabit would be imaginative and thought-provoking. The first half of the book is excellent, although I was far more interested in Giselle's development as an artist than Jackie's involvement in a tech start-up, and Ellen's life taking over a derelict building and starting a community garden was given less space. Each woman finds their own path, two with substantial buy-in from billionaires. The first part of the novel is the strongest, depicting New York in the nineties, with each woman showing a different aspect of life in that time, from neighbors fighting gentrification to the long hours demanded of tech workers.

The final half of the novel, where Ko takes her characters into the future, is the weakest part of this book. The world she depicts here is that of a thousand other dystopian novels, a disappointment after the inventiveness of the first half of the book. That genre, with its future world basically the same across the board, is very popular and her version of it will no doubt be interesting to many readers, but I was bored. The first half, however, was very good.… (more)