Another great novel by Powers, this time focusing on the power and significance of the ocean. Overall, a story that tackles climate change, humanity's impact on the environment, capitalism, and technology, all told with Powers well-written prose and complex characterizations. Readers who enjoyed Elif Shafak's "There Are Rivers in the Sky" will like this one.

Powers is so good at taking contemporary science and our big ethical dilemmas, and channeling those things into compelling stories

The Pulitzer Award-winning author of The Overstory explores humanity's impact on the oceans in his new novel.
The primary narrator of Richard Powers' latest novel, Playground, is Todd Keane, who at 57 years old has recently been diagnosed with Lewy body dementia, a degenerative disease that affects thinking, memory, and movement. Addressing his account to an unidentified "you," Todd wants to relay "the story of my friend and me and how we changed the future of mankind" before his disease overwhelms him. That friend is Rafi Young, a fellow wunderkind with whom he bonded in high school over games of Go; Todd then went on to build an insanely popular social media platform called Playground. It's this linear storyline that forms the backbone of this complex, multilayered tale.

Weaving around this storyline, like the threads of a fine tapestry, are several other compelling plotlines. One centers on the French Polynesian island of Makatea, whose 82 residents have just weeks to decide between maintaining their lifestyle in harmony with nature or embracing a technological future that they're told will bring an economic boom. Another narrates the experiences of Evelyne Beaulieu, a French Canadian diver who's spent most of her life studying the wonders of the ocean. Still another unfolds around Ina Aroita, a Pacific Islander who creates sculptures from plastic and other trash disgorged by the polluted ocean. As the narrative jumps unpredictably back and forth through time and space, Powers explores diverse themes such as friendships gained and lost; humanity's impact on the planet, especially its oceans; neocolonialism; sexism in the sciences; the development and future of artificial intelligence; and many others.

If this all makes it sound like Playground is dense and complicated, there's a reason for that. But Powers' genius is his ability to form a cohesive and absorbing narrative from what at first seems to be a disorienting, unrelated mishmash of ideas. And as always, his writing is luminous. When 10-year-old Todd finds inspiration in a book about the ocean, for example, Powers writes:

"The book sparked endless living experiments inside my head. Every page animated the incalculably large and inexplicably bizarre universe beneath the ocean's surface. Each sentence was a blue-black mystery populated by creatures more fantastic than any role-playing dungeon crawl."

Later, the author describes Evelyne writing the book that will ultimately be read by Todd:

"She wrote of swimming at night in the black, warm water of the South China Sea, when every paddle of her limbs triggered a swirling Milky Way of animals flashing blue and white. Three-quarters of ocean species, from zooplankton to giant squid, were signaling in a language of living light."

Such lush descriptions populate much of the novel; the reader can sense Powers' own childlike wonder at the undersea world. The novel is filled, too, with interesting trivia about the ocean—like how a leatherback turtle "must cry two gallons of water every hour, just to keep its blood less salty than the sea"—and tidbits of history, like a description of how phosphate mining impacted Makatea in the first half of the 20th century.

Playground's characters are richly drawn; even minor characters have a life of their own. Particularly interesting are the Makatean characters, such as a woman named Palila Tepa, whom the islanders call the Queen, who has memorized over a thousand songs about the island's ancient history, and Mayor Didier Turi, who simply wants everyone to like him and is baffled by the changes he's forced to oversee.

The narrative's intricacy and non-linear format did make Playground difficult to get into at first; it was a good forty pages before I was truly sucked in (after which I couldn't put it down). The novel's disjointedness may make it a challenging read for some. That said, it is unquestionably worth the effort.

At one point in Playground, Evelyne thinks that she'd like to write a book: "To try one more time to make the land dwellers love the wild, unfathomable God of waters. To give the smallest hint of creatures so varied and inventive and otherworldly that they might compel humility and stop human progress in its tracks with awe." One feels this, too, is the heart and the goal of Playground. And for this reader, mission accomplished.

Shades of “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” meets “The Overstory”.

I was in a small minority of people who didn’t love The Overstory, but really glad I gave Powers a second chance with this book. I knew his ability to write descriptively about nature, in this case the ocean, was/is incredible, but it was his characterization in this book that felt particularly compelling. This felt especially true with the Rafi and Todd coming of age storyline.

I also loved the sprinkled in bits of social commentary throughout the last half of the book. I’ve read a ton of non-fiction this year, but it was a reminder that fiction can pack an equal punch in its ability to comment on society through the empathy building that narrative uniquely brings.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC—check this out!

Richard Powers’ Playground is an ambitious novel that explores oceanography, technology, friendship, and our longing for beauty, community, and immortality through four key characters. The main narrator, Todd Keane, is a tech genius from a wealthy family who creates Playground, a social media app that makes him a billionaire. Todd tells the story of his friendship with Rafi Young, a brilliant but underprivileged Black student who loves literature. The two young men bond over chess and Go in high school but have a falling out in college over Todd’s tech idea. Now, with a diagnosis of dementia with Lewy bodies, Todd reflects on their crumbling friendship—but it’s clear we cannot trust everything he says.

The story also takes us to the tiny island of Makatea, ravaged by colonialism and environmental destruction. On this French Polynesian island, Evelyne Beaulieu, a feisty pioneering Canadian marine biologist now in her old age, is still dedicated to preserving the ocean’s fragile beauty, while Rafi’s partner, Ina, a Hawaiian-Tahitian artist, creates sculptures from plastic pollution. Powers contrasts the rise of Big Tech and billionaires’ vanity projects with the fall of a paradise, asking if humanity can still find a way forward.

I must admit that I have some mixed feelings about the book. I loved Evelyne’s—and Powers’—passion for the ocean and the descriptions of marine life are wonderfully lush. But the novel often felt fragmented due to the sprawling storylines and some of the characters, especially Rafi, are uncomfortably stereotyped and superficially sketched through some cringeworthy dialogue. There’s a major narrative twist near the end, and while it didn’t fully explain or make up for the weaker parts, it made me rethink everything about the story until this big reveal.

Playground is at its heart about play: chess, computer games, tricks played on unsuspecting readers, the ways we engage with our loved ones, and the wonders of play in the natural world. It’s thought-provoking and worth sticking with, even if it’s not perfect.

Many thanks to W.W. Norton and NetGalley for the ARC.

A love letter to the ocean and its hidden depths. Much like The Overstory, Powers employs astounding reverence for one of our most complex and abundant natural resources.

Speculative fiction can hold up a mirror to our current moment — extrapolating, distorting, and ultimately exploring the ripple effects of what our future could hold. Playground succeeds in doing just that as the plot converges and collides with the dawn of the AI age in surprising ways. On those marks alone, it’s a winner. It’s elegantly crafted and consistently engaging, but it never fully won me over.

The narrative ebbs and flows between characters and timelines, with each thread carefully fleshed out and fully realized. My hope that these individual strands would tightly weave back together in the end was not to be. Instead, the ending left me puzzled. I had to consult with other readers and do a careful re-read of the final portion of the book to understand just what transpired. And still, I’m not sure. This may be an issue of comprehension on my end, so I look forward to seeing what others think upon the book's release. That said, I genuinely enjoyed reading Playground, and I believe many others will find it just as captivating.

Rafi and Todd meet in their teens in Chicago and their friendship forms the foundation for half of this book. Intermingled with their story is the story of the ocean which includes following the life of a ground-breaking female ocean explorer as well as a college classmate of Rafi and Todd's who grew up in Polynesia. This eco-fiction story was multi-faceted and compelling. A good choice for book clubs (I need to discuss the ending with someone!)

Powers has such a way with words that in my mind, the story is secondary. In Playground, he effortlessly weaves between different characters and locales, all while feeding you some insight into the wonders of the ocean. It's a mesmerizing book that gently lulled me from page to page in a satisfying way.

You wouldn't expect so many different plot points to gel together - an AI tech billionaire from Chicago, a Black poet/writer, an islander and artist, and a nonagenarian with more diving experience that just about anyone.

When the French Polynesian island Makatea is up for a controversial vote, all of these characters and their challenges come together at last. I really enjoyed the journey this story took me along, and this was a worthy contender for the Booker longlist.

Wow. A few years ago I read “The Overstory,” a mindblowing tale of trees, activism, and character. It’s quite possible that in “Playground” Richard Powers exceeded the brilliance of “The Overstory.”

12-year-old Evie’s father straps a prototype of an aqualung onto her and throws her in a pool, launching her a lifelong obsession with being underwater. Ina grows up on naval bases on Pacific islands. Todd and Rafi, boys from opposite cultures in Chicago, meet in school and find purpose and meaning in a 3,000-year-old board game. As they grown and change, their lives begin to overlap until in late middle-age they meet again on an island in French Polynesia.

Between that first dive and the final scene on the island, we drift hypnotically through coral reefs, painful decisions by the characters, technological leaps, climate change, a changing world.

The book was at times baffling. Three days later I’m still pondering the ending. But I feel like living inside that book for a week was a joy and a privilege and confirmed for me just how lucky we are to have Richard Powers writing in our time.

Thanks Netgalley and the publisher for the advanced reader’s copy of this book.

Another brilliant and capacious work from Richard Powers, who illuminates the ocean's marvels as he illuminated the trees for us in THE OVERSTORY.

"As Arthur C. Clarke has observed, 'How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.'"

I almost don't know where to begin with a review of this beautifully-written novel. Once again Richard Powers has drawn our attention to the environment--this time to our magnificent oceans and the amazingly rich habitat that comprises two-thirds of this planet.

But at its heart, this is the tale of three friends and a deep exploration of their relationships. The chief narrator is Todd Keane who feels the need to record everything, telling his story to 'someone,' and for a long time I believed he was telling that story to me, the reader. But no, it is something much more than that.

Todd grew up in a 'castle' in Evanston, IL, where he listened to his wealthy parents battle through an unhappy marriage. Todd's refuge became Lake Michigan where he imagined himself sinking beneath the surface and breathing underwater. He learned one way to earn his father's esteem was to excel at game playing and he was 10 the first time he beat his 37-year-old father at backgammon. (Make it 3 out of 5?) Board games led to electronic games and eventually to computers.

As Todd relates this story, he's 57, his net worth is in the billions, and he's created a platform known as Playground with over a billion users. Now one of his companies is bringing an idea for creating autonomous floating cities to an island in the South Pacific.

Todd met his best friend, Rafi Young, at St Ignatius of Loyola College Prep. Rafi, the son of a black Chicago fire fighter, was encouraged by his father to become a reader at an early age and his intelligence lifted him out of Chicago's South Side. But Rafi always felt he had destroyed his family and he carries that guilt in a pursuit of perfection.

The two friends eventually go off to the University of Illinois together, one to study computer science and the other literature, where they meet an artist named Ina Aroita, a Pacific Islander. The three quickly become inseparable and both young men fall in love...

Now, years later, Ina and Rafi are married and living on the island of Makatea in French Polynesia with two children they have adopted. The island's 82 residents have learned they have a decision to make. Should they allow a new business venture to invade their idyllic paradise?

One of the newer residents of the island is a 92-year-old woman named Evelyne Beaulieu, whose father was one of the scientists who invented the aqualung, and at 12, she tested it out for him at the bottom of their family pool. She went on to be the first woman in ocean studies and the author of Clearly It Is Ocean, the book that so entranced young Todd at the age of 10.

The story is quite involved but eventually all these threads come together in a very meaningful way. I read the first 20% late one evening and the next morning realized I'd have to reread what I'd read the night before and make notes of all the characters.

There are so many themes as well. Todd sounds a warning of where technology is probably leading us. But the great beauty of the novel is the ocean and what is to be found beneath the surface that so few can see. What gorgeous descriptive writing!

Many thanks to the author and publisher for providing me with an arc of this magnificent new novel. I have now read three of Richard Powers's books, all of which have been 5-star reads for me. Obviously I'm blown away by his writing.

Playground by Richard Powers is a highly recommended literary eco-drama of AI and oceanography that follows four different personal perspectives over decades. Opening on the French Polynesian island of Makatea the creation myth of Ta'aroa cracking out of his eggshell, and uses the shards to make the world is told. On Makatea, which was once mined for the deposits of phosphorus on the island, the residents must now vote on whether they want to approve a seasteading project on and off their shores.

Jumping back in time, twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu tests one of the first aqualungs and goes on to become a celebrated Canadian marine biologist and one of the world's best divers. She is now in her nineties and lives on the island. Rafi Young and Todd Keane meet at an elite Chicago high school and bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game called Go. The two are roommates in college where Rafi focuses on literature while Todd works toward a breakthrough in AI. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. At college Rafi falls in love with Ina whose mother is Tahitian.

The lives of these four people all converge on Makatea. Evie, Rafi, and Ina all live on the island. Todd is behind the seasteading project to create artificial islands that will be launch to float on the sea. Todd tells part the story of the past involving Rafi in retrospect at age 57, while he is dealing with his diagnosis of dementia with Lewy bodies. He is not always a reliable narrator. The main characters are all well-developed, but also feel a bit idealized or symbolic.

As expected, Powers writes eloquently, with wonderfully descriptive passages. There are parts that soar and will totally hold your complete attention. He writes with reverence about the natural world. Many of the underwater passages are spellbinding. He explores friendship, AI, and play. On the other hand, many of the complex passages require great patience to read, which makes the flow and pace of the novel feel uneven. Parts felt incomplete, unrealized and the final denouement felt too open ended. Thanks to W. W. Norton & Company for providing me with an advance reader's copy via NetGalley. My review is voluntary and expresses my honest opinion.

The review will be published on Edelweiss, Barnes & Noble and Amazon.

Playground is a stunner with more beautiful writing than you’ll find in a dozen other completely respectable novels combined. The story is sprawling and interconnected and seemingly about everything—from artificial intelligence to dying oceans to the tenuous connections between human beings—which is to say it’s complex, but infinitely rewarding.

Richard Powers needs no introduction. He's prolific and The Overstory has to been one of the most read books of the 2010s. Each Powers novel is deeply imbued with big questions about the universe and life (as in the existence of). Playground is no different. A story of capitalism, climate change, and how everything in the universe is connected as one giant existence, Playground will have you thinking about it for days after you finish reading.

I don't have the best track record with Powers and I probably wouldn't have picked this one up, had it not been for the Booker Longlist. There are definitely very interesting concepts in this one. I've been discussing the ending of this one so much since finishing it. I find myself both annoyed and fascinated and thinking about it. I'm really excited to have more people read this because there are some really discussable things in this. I would also be curious to read any interviews etc. with the author. This one is really hard for me to rate because if the author meant things to be taken a certain way, my rating would be infinitely higher than if it were meant to be taken a different way.

Thank you so much to WW Norton for the ARC.

When a novel is this good, I feel any words I might add in praise of it will be too paltry. Just know that the characters, the settings, the storyline, and the relevance are all so amazingly and seamlessly melded into this work of art.

Thanks to NetGalley and W.W.Norton and Company for the ARC to read and review.

PLAYGROUND
Richard Powers

Although Richard Powers’ PLAYGROUND is not published in the US yet, it has been longlisted for THE BOOKER PRIZE 2024. It is due to be released on September 24, 2024. The themes in this book are indicative of and like many other titles on the list.

If all the books have a similar theme it is SYMBIOSIS.

But I’m getting ahead of myself and we’re only talking about PLAYGROUND here today. So let’s take a step back and talk about it.

My first experience with Richard Powers didn’t go over well. I DNF’d OVERSTORY and although it was an Oprah Book Club choice, I decided it wasn’t for me. Then I read BEWILDERMENT and was blown away. Powers’ connection to language and to the Earth is extraordinary. And to be a part of it as a reader is a wonderful experience.

PLAYGROUND features characters, but it is more about how we interact with our environment and secondly how we interact with each other. One prominent storyline features a curious young boy who grows into a successful businessman. To have that success he essentially must unbecome a lot of who he is. The two identities cannot exist in the same body.

Is there a version of you that you need to let go of to allow a new rendition to come in?

PLAYGROUND is about symbiosis. How when two things come together a new thing is born. There is no end of us and a beginning to the universe. We extend beyond our human form and part of our expression as humans is how we treat this part of us that is the universe.

You are not a human in the universe. You are the universe.

It is a lot about how we interact with our environment. It’s also about the lasting changes we make to our environment. How all of us who inhabit the EARTH change it for the worse.

In some ways Powers is a literary boy scout. Who wants us to leave this Earth better than we found it. It is in our nature to have dominion over all. To do that we must first have dominion over ourselves.

And every single choice we make as we make it through our days and nights makes a difference. Sam recycling in New York, helps the fish in the deep blue sea in California. Every time we litter or drive our cars, or water our yards unnecessarily, we take. From the forests to the oceans and everything in and between continents.
If you want a flavor of all the books, PLAYGROUND is the one I recommend. An easy Five Stars.

*Full-cast narration


Thanks to W.W. Norton, Netgalley and Spotify Audiobooks for the advanced copies!

PLAYGROUND… ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

My favorite books are those that make me feel deep emotion, think critically and linger long after reading. Playground by Richard Powers does all of these. The Overstory is my favorite book of all time so I was very excited to read Playground. The rich character development of Evelyne, Rafi and Todd carried the book through a story about environmental degradation, climate change, colonialism, capitalism and AI. So many immense topics but they are woven together beautifully and the twist at the end caught me completely off guard. Playground is a love story to the ocean as The Overstory is to trees. The descriptions of ocean life are breathtaking and Evelyne’s story completely captivated me. Highly, highly recommend.

Thank you to Net Galley and W.W. Norton & Company for the the opportunity to read an ARC of this book.

Astounding work from Richard Powers. Relevant and affecting. Highly enjoyed this one, the plot, the characters, the setting. Powerful book.

Richard Powers is one heck of a writer. In his books, he finds a magical way of elucidating big world issues, like the cosmos or the environment, while at the same time capturing the very real, very human experiences of his characters in an evocative way. Playground weaves a fascinating tale of four different characters who eventually all wind up on the Polynesian Island of Makatea. It's an exploration of the possibilities of AI, of the human impact on the environment, of the complexity of relationships, and of the consequences of our actions and desires. Every step of the way, there's something beautiful and something to think about and I guarantee this book will make you feel things! I couldn't put it down and I'm in awe of what Powers has created here. Maybe the best book I've read so far this year!