Memory Piece by Lisa Ko: book review
Overview: Giselle, Ellen, and Jackie meet as pre-teens in New Jersey, and the novel follows them through their three very different paths in New York City and spans some sixty years, starting in the eighties and jumping far into the future.
Giselle wants to be an artist. She wants to make a point that art is work, labor. She's a performance artist and manages to get some acclaim. Jackie is a programmer with strong ideas but also a strong affinity for the traditional path, including a compromising but well paying job. Ellen is the idealist who nurtures her squat into a co-op over the years. Their paths collide then stray far from one another before finding their way back as the world enters an apocalyptic future that's not too far from our own. Overall: 3
Characters: 3 I struggled with the writing in a way that heavily impacted my relationship with the characters. The scenes are full of so much backstory that's not actually in-scene that it's hard to get to know these characters. The novel jumps between all three main character's points of view, but they aren't labeled, so it's quite jarring. I often struggled to figure out whose point of view I was reading from after a jump because the voices weren't particularly differentiated. It took reading multiple pages to piece together enough clues to determine who I was reading about. The voices didn't feel individual, and they also didn't evolve over the large span of time from childhood through becoming elderly. There was a real lack of growth and depth that frustrated me. They were archetypes that were interesting, but I felt like we never got deep enough into these people to experience them as detailed, rich, and layered; the chaotic style of the book's story didn't do them any favors. I feel like the characterization was by far the strongest in the childhood chapters at the beginning and in Giselle's chapters.
Plot: 3 I didn't read anything about the book ahead of time, so it was quite a jarring journey starting out reading a book about some suburban kids in the 1980s and ending in a near future military state. Unfortunately, there was a lack of coherence to the narrative that made it hard to stay invested across the time and character jumps. Half the time, I felt like I was hurtling in the rocket ship with no clue where the destination might be, and not in an intriguing, suspenseful way.
Writing: 3 The pacing and some of the stylistic choices in this book made it a challenging endeavor to get through. There were so many interesting concepts baked in that weren't fully delivered on. As the book goes on, the tightness of the plot unravels and it becomes harder to follow each jump. The world building and descriptions also grew less rooted and harder to follow, which was unfortunate because these elements were most key when the world shifted to be more sci-fi inspired and less familiar. The inability to fully grasp the contours of the world hampered the characters' concluding arcs.
The pacing also made the book difficult to finish. There was a lot of info dumping and passivity, especially in the later chapters that made the book lose any action and urgency. The shifting first and third person usage and seemingly random switches when it came to either using quotation marks or abandoning them just added to the haphazard energy in the novel. There were plenty of interesting ideas here. They just never melded together completely or carried an individual thread that felt strong enough for the book to stand on.
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