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"Lucas and Margo are fed up. Margo is a brilliant programmer tired of being talked over as the company's sole black employee, and while Lucas is one of many Asians at the firm, he's nearly invisible as a low-paid customer service rep. Together, they decide to steal their tech start-up's user database in an attempt at revenge. The heist takes a sudden turn when Margo dies in a car accident, and Lucas is left reeling, wondering what to do with their secret--and wondering whether her death really was an accident. When Lucas hacks into Margo's computer looking for answers, he is drawn into her secret online life and realizes just how little he knew about his best friend. With a fresh voice, biting humor, and piercing observations about human nature, Kevin Nguyen brings an insider's knowledge of the tech industry to this imaginative novel. A pitch-perfect exploration of race and start-up culture, secrecy and surveillance, social media and friendship, New Waves asks: How well do we really know each other? And how do we form true intimacy and connection in a tech-obsessed world?"--… (more)
User reviews
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.