One of those weird ride books that you liked but at the end are like ok why did I like this? ( )

The marketing summary for this novel is a little misleading. One is led to believe that it will be a digital heist story with the possible murder of one of the perpetrators followed by mysterious revelations about her true backstory. Instead we are given a meandering narrative devoid of any real suspense or clear development of this premise. The characters are filled with vague angst and motivations. They seem to spend far too much time in bars morosely drinking while ruminating on the cruel world. Nguyen includes a series of strange sci-fi stories found on the dead woman’s laptop. Regrettably, these aren’t very interesting and have little obvious relevance to the main plot of the novel.

Nguyen explores themes related to the digital age, including the lack of human connection, the ephemeral nature of start-ups and their cutthroat environments. He also includes a theme of racism, but this seems gratuitous since little comes from the fact that two of the main characters are minorities. Margo is a brilliant Black computer engineer with a penchant for speaking her mind and drinking a lot of booze. Lucas is a Vietnamese American, who is an introvert suffering from copious amounts of self-doubt and his fair share of aimlessness. Jill is a struggling novelist whose role seems to be as a sounding board for the two minority characters. All three first met online but find each other through incredible coincidences.

I was tempted to quit this book but instead trudged ahead hoping that something interesting would eventually occur. Trust me; it doesn’t. Instead, its unsatisfying end comes with little resolved in yet another bar. This time in Tokyo. ( )

New Waves by Kevin Nguyen is weird in that speculative fiction way but still readable with an actual plot so not quite...but maybe you’re getting the idea. Main character, Lucas, lives and works in New York--barely surviving as a customer service rep at a tech startup. When his best friend, Margo, dies, Lucas begins a strange mourning process that includes hacking into Margo’s computer and starting a relationship with one of her online friends. They find a series of stories Margo recorded late at night and these are sprinkled throughout the narrative. All of this just acts as a cover for conjecture about race, technology, class and privacy that is mostly thoughtful and interesting. New Waves is definitely not for everyone, but I found just enough story and character development to keep me involved while the topics and intellectual musings hit their mark. ( )

Okaaay….I read this book, but at the end, I’m not sure what I got out of it. After thinking about ti for a week, I still don’t understand where it was going. Lucas, who on a whim moves to New York City where he takes a position as customer rep at a tech firm. There he meets Margot, a bright, opinionated engineer for the company. They become friends and steal the customer database before leaving for another company. Then Margot dies and Lucas, adrift and lonely, gets asked by Margot’s mother to delete Margot’s Facebook account. Lucas takes her laptop and in searching her files finds a former friend of Margot’s, with whom he begins a relationship. He eventually moves back to Oregon and when he learns he got money from stock he owned in a tech company ends up moving to Tokyo, where Margot wanted to move. It was a challenging book to read. ( )