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A review by andreeavis
Memory Piece by Lisa Ko
dark
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.0
Memory Piece has potential. The concept of following three women friends across decades, exploring the evolution of their lives and their bond, is appealing. But somewhere along the way, the execution faltered.
The book explores the story of three Asian American teenagers, Giselle Chi, Jackie Ong, and Ellen Ng, who meet at a Chinese school in New York, in the 1980s. We follow their on-and-off friendship until the dystopian future of 2040. Each chapter explores one friend's life, but here's where things get cluttered. The narrative overwhelms you with name-drops: pop culture relics from a bygone era (meaningless to a reader outside that specific space and time), random childhood acquaintances reappearing years later with no real purpose, and a dizzying list of artists, tech moguls, and obscure art installations. It's like the author spilt a thesaurus of the past few decades onto the page.
Then there are the characters themselves. They lack depth, feeling more like sketches than fully realised people. Gisele, whose parents are Chinese Filipino immigrants, grows up with a former beauty pageant mother obsessed with her weight and her diet. Perhaps that explains her rebellious spirit: she gave up college to do performance art. After doing menial jobs to support her art pieces, she becomes famous and her last performance is one of disappearing from the public eye.
Jackie fares slightly better. The second chapter of the book is dedicated to Jackie. Coming from a well-off Chinese family who immigrated to New York, Jackie at first followed the path set for her by her family. But, realising that “to depend on her parents for tuition meant to tolerate her father’s silences and her mother’s ruminating anxieties”, she dropped college. Passionate about computers and coding, she becomes an engineer and works at an up-and-coming startup on the verge of getting big funding. However, things turn dire when she finds out that the startup sells up users’ data and eventually, with the crash of dotcom, the company fails. Jackie, however, has her self-built app to fall back on. After living with Ellen for a while (they have a quick fling), she sells the app she was building on her own, cashes in and eventually leaves New York too.
Ellen is a community activist, focused on saving old houses by living in them, illegally. She has a close group of friends dedicated to the cause and, at the turn of the century, she lives in a beautiful old mansion with them, eating food they rummage from the supermarket trash. She is the most distant of the three friends and we only meet her briefly in the other chapters, except for the short fling she had with Jackie.
The final chapter, Ellen’s, throws you into a dystopian future (the year 2040) and contrasts the earlier chapters. The writing style even shifts. This future segment, while intriguing, feels like a separate story altogether. Perhaps a novella exploring this world could be interesting, but here it feels tonally off.
Finally, the social commentary is all over the place. The book wants to be a commentary on everything: teenage body image struggles, Asian parental expectations, queer love, social activism, performance art, the dot-com bubble burst, and, later on, climate change. I got lost in another topic thrown at me, alongside the name-dropping of pop references and places in New York.
Ultimately, Memory Piece left me wanting more. The foundation for a powerful story exists, but the execution drowns it out in a cacophony of references and underdeveloped characters.
The book explores the story of three Asian American teenagers, Giselle Chi, Jackie Ong, and Ellen Ng, who meet at a Chinese school in New York, in the 1980s. We follow their on-and-off friendship until the dystopian future of 2040. Each chapter explores one friend's life, but here's where things get cluttered. The narrative overwhelms you with name-drops: pop culture relics from a bygone era (meaningless to a reader outside that specific space and time), random childhood acquaintances reappearing years later with no real purpose, and a dizzying list of artists, tech moguls, and obscure art installations. It's like the author spilt a thesaurus of the past few decades onto the page.
Then there are the characters themselves. They lack depth, feeling more like sketches than fully realised people. Gisele, whose parents are Chinese Filipino immigrants, grows up with a former beauty pageant mother obsessed with her weight and her diet. Perhaps that explains her rebellious spirit: she gave up college to do performance art. After doing menial jobs to support her art pieces, she becomes famous and her last performance is one of disappearing from the public eye.
Jackie fares slightly better. The second chapter of the book is dedicated to Jackie. Coming from a well-off Chinese family who immigrated to New York, Jackie at first followed the path set for her by her family. But, realising that “to depend on her parents for tuition meant to tolerate her father’s silences and her mother’s ruminating anxieties”, she dropped college. Passionate about computers and coding, she becomes an engineer and works at an up-and-coming startup on the verge of getting big funding. However, things turn dire when she finds out that the startup sells up users’ data and eventually, with the crash of dotcom, the company fails. Jackie, however, has her self-built app to fall back on. After living with Ellen for a while (they have a quick fling), she sells the app she was building on her own, cashes in and eventually leaves New York too.
Ellen is a community activist, focused on saving old houses by living in them, illegally. She has a close group of friends dedicated to the cause and, at the turn of the century, she lives in a beautiful old mansion with them, eating food they rummage from the supermarket trash. She is the most distant of the three friends and we only meet her briefly in the other chapters, except for the short fling she had with Jackie.
The final chapter, Ellen’s, throws you into a dystopian future (the year 2040) and contrasts the earlier chapters. The writing style even shifts. This future segment, while intriguing, feels like a separate story altogether. Perhaps a novella exploring this world could be interesting, but here it feels tonally off.
Finally, the social commentary is all over the place. The book wants to be a commentary on everything: teenage body image struggles, Asian parental expectations, queer love, social activism, performance art, the dot-com bubble burst, and, later on, climate change. I got lost in another topic thrown at me, alongside the name-dropping of pop references and places in New York.
Ultimately, Memory Piece left me wanting more. The foundation for a powerful story exists, but the execution drowns it out in a cacophony of references and underdeveloped characters.