Playground by Richard Powers

Without the ability to feel sad, a person could not be kind or thoughtful, because you wouldn’t care or know how anybody else feels. Without sadness, you would never learn anything from history. Sadness is the key to loving what you love and to becoming better than you were. A person who never felt sad would be a monster.
Page 82

In a nutshell

Playground follows the very different lives of four main characters. Rafi and Todd, polar opposites who met at an elite highschool and bonded over their mutual love of games. When they grow up Rafi will get lost in literature while Todd’s work will lead to an AI breakthrough. Then there is Ina, Rafi’s college sweetheart who grew up on the islands with art as her only home. Finally there is Evie, a French Canadian diver breaking boundaries. Their paths will cross, then uncross until they meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea, where a plan is set in motion to send floating autonomous cities out in the open sea.

Book Club Notes

You can’t deny that this book is brilliantly written – it’s clear why Richard Powers is a Pulitzer Prize-Winning author. That being said literary brilliance doesn’t always translate into a brilliant book, at least not for me. This book took me a while to get into, I stayed the course because of how well it was written. Once I finally had a grasp on the storyline and characters I found myself enjoying the story not just the words. It was going really well, in fact I was fully enjoying it until I got to the final chapters. Have you ever watched a movie, thought you knew what was happening and then been hit with a “twist” at the end that makes you question what you just watched. That’s what reading Playground felt like to me. Instead of coming to a conclusion, I was left with more questions about what was real and what wasn’t. It felt anti-climatic. In short, while it is brilliantly written, and there were parts of the story I loved (Evie was by far my favorite character), the storyline fell flat, reminding of the books I read in highschool English Lit, that demanded hours of debate and deciphering to uncover the big message.