Memory Piece by Lisa Ko

I read this because it was on Obama's 2024 Summer Reading list, and I often love the books that he recommends, but not so with this one. It follows three friends, Giselle Chin, Jackie Ong, and Ellen Ng, through sixty years of their lives as they try to figure out what it means to create art, to care, and to make a difference. 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. 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. The shape shifting that occurs at the end of the story in 2040 is where the book lost me--it is an imagined future that is very bleak--wand may be exactly what is in store for us, but it was a bit much for me. I am not one to read post-apocalypse stories of any kind, and while this was not so much that, it wasn't my cup of tea either.