by Lisa Ko
First published 2025
Giselle Chin, Jackie Ong, and Ellen Ng bond over their shared weirdness as teenagers in the early 1980s. They see themselves as future artistic collaborators, united by their desire to escape conformity and create something meaningful together. The three friends imagine lives built on freedom and creativity, far from the world that seems to reject them. Decades pass. Their youthful clarity blurs into adult compromise. Giselle navigates the elite art world as a performance artist, discovering social hierarchies she never expected. Jackie codes in the internet's early days, watching its democratic promise twist into corporate surveillance. Ellen fights gentrification and aggressive policing in her New York neighborhood as a community activist. Their friendship shifts and deepens as they age. Success becomes harder to define. What once seemed important fades while new priorities emerge. The world they inherited looks nothing like the one they were promised as teenagers. Each woman must decide what kind of life she can build from the gap between expectation and reality.
Genres: literary-fiction, american-fiction, friendship, contemporary, 21st-century, activism
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: New York
Period: 1980s, Decades
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