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A review by gabdee
Memory Piece by Lisa Ko
2.0
I had such a hard time with this one - The Leavers was like a top ten book for me but this new book by Ko is so lacking. The pace of this book is absurd - each small paragraph is a whole new topic and a whole scene is like a page long. We’ve gone from elementary to post college adult by page 50 and skirted over a whole year of performance art piece in the span of two pages. The book wanted to touch on A LOT of social commentary and that left the book filled with messages lacking subtlety and no real story worth reading.
An excerpt:
“She stayed up late in front of the TV, not going to bed until Holger was asleep. She sat on steps of Union Square and watched skateboarders doing tricks… The sun setting through the spaces between buildings, the traffic doing its slow bump on Broadway. One by one, cars turned on their lights.
She flew to Florida on an early-morning flight…”
Is she in front of a TV or in Union Square or making her way to an airport? Or has already flown and landed in Florida? What is happening? Why does a new thing happen each sentence? lol this is one excerpt to sample what I felt dozens of times. When the book in turn changed POV character at 100 pages in and again at 200 to our third main character I lost it. It was so scattered and incomplete and then we just leave them to follow another character?
I’ll add the disclaimer that I’m not a big art scene person so I lacked excitement about this book from the start but I’m bummed.
An excerpt:
“She stayed up late in front of the TV, not going to bed until Holger was asleep. She sat on steps of Union Square and watched skateboarders doing tricks… The sun setting through the spaces between buildings, the traffic doing its slow bump on Broadway. One by one, cars turned on their lights.
She flew to Florida on an early-morning flight…”
Is she in front of a TV or in Union Square or making her way to an airport? Or has already flown and landed in Florida? What is happening? Why does a new thing happen each sentence? lol this is one excerpt to sample what I felt dozens of times. When the book in turn changed POV character at 100 pages in and again at 200 to our third main character I lost it. It was so scattered and incomplete and then we just leave them to follow another character?
I’ll add the disclaimer that I’m not a big art scene person so I lacked excitement about this book from the start but I’m bummed.