Heller McAlpin
"[Powers] nimbly hopscotches between the wonders of nature and the marvels and dangers of cutting-edge science.… [B]rims with love for humanity and the planet."
Alexandra Jacobs
"[Powers is] a grand old oak of American letters: a towering, sturdy figure often overlooked for flashier species.… Playground is an enchanting entry point to his work that swings open easily.… [R]eminds, with a spirit of fun and wonder, why the sea—an alien planet within a planet—is so very worth sustained attention.… [T]he late twist…whorled as a seashell, may leave even the highest VO2 max reader gasping a little for air.… This is a novel that pries us from our daily hourglass, forcing a hard focus on the sand."
National Book Review - Wendy Smith
"Soaringly imaginative yet firmly grounded…[Playground] deals with the most pressing issues of our time in the most wrenchingly human terms."
Guardian - Xan Brooks
"Ambitious, rapturous.… A transcendentalist deep dive of a novel.… A fabulous exploration."
The 2024 Booker Prize Judges
"A characterful, capacious and engaging novel.… Powers’ unparalleled gifts for revealing the magic and mystery of the natural world are on full display."
Independent - Nick Duerden
"You’ll never look at the ocean the same way again. Playground isn’t merely a great American novel, but a magnificent one.… Increasingly gripping…brilliant on the complications of friendship…incandescently beautiful.… In a word: wow."
New York Review of Books - Regina Marler
"Ravishing.… [Playground] implores us to open ourselves to the ingenuity of life beyond the human."
Emma Donoghue
"An extraordinarily immersive journey through lives linked in mysterious ways—gripping, alarming, and uplifting."
Andrea Wulf
"Powers is a master of taking important topics of our times—from threats to our oceans and climate change to AI—and turning them into riveting and fiercely relevant books imbued with psychological insight and a deep awe for nature. This eloquent dance of the scientific and emotional makes him one of our finest storytellers. Playground is brilliant, captivating, and important—and the best book I’ve read this year."
Garden & Gun - Jonathan Miles
"Powers evokes [the ocean’s] ever more fragile splendor with glimmering schools of sensual detail.… Ultra-vivid, wildly gripping, and visionary."
Vogue - Taylor Antrim
"Vivid and ambitious…a love letter to the natural world.… Playground is ravishing in its descriptions of an underwater universe as fragile as it is ancient and unyielding."
Washington Independent Review of Books - Kristin H. Macomber
"Magnificent.… A provocative exploration of our depths both interior and oceanic."
Financial Times - John Self
"Paint[s] the page with colour and refracted light.… [H]ugely ambitious."
People
"History unspools in this luminous journey that interweaves a 3,000-year-old board game, AI and floating cities.… [A]ll-around delightful."
Percival Everett
"Is there anything Richard Powers cannot write? The world here is complete, seductive, and promising. The writing feels like the ocean. Vast, mysterious, deep, and alive."
Guardian - Yagnishsing Dawoor
"Powers writes with erudition and electrifying beauty.… [T]rue, indisputable greatness."
Ron Charles
"Brilliant.… Powers draws these stories together in a mind-bending way that will transform the way you see the world."
Boston Globe - Hamilton Cain
"Richly hued.… [G]orgeous.… [N]o author has done more to turn our gaze outward to the mysteries of the universe, above our heads and below our feet."
Los Angeles Times - David L. Ulin
"Exhilarating.… [I]ntoxicating.… [A] sprawling parable of a book."
Nashville Scene - Emily Choate
"Inimitable.… [Playground] immers[es] us in a boundless sense of wonder."
Open Letters Review - Tom LeClair
"[Powers is] the greatest living American novelist.… An impressive and warm-hearted book."
Atlantic - Randy Boyagoda
"Unexpected and genuinely fascinating.… Ingenious tricks and clever devices abound in Powers’s fiction, but never before with the provocative implications of the turn in Playground."
Glamour UK - Chaya Colman and Sophie Ezra
"A richly layered story that examines the intersection of technology, nature, and personal relationships. Powers’ signature blend of intellectual depth and compelling storytelling shines through.… Thought-provoking literature that engages both the mind and heart."
Shelf Awareness - Shahina Piyarali
"A novel of spectacular thematic scope and surreal drama… The author's genius shows in his formidable descriptive talents and the graceful clarity of his densely woven plot… Powers meticulously sets the stage with vivid, immersive details to ignite the readers imagination."
starred review Booklist
"Evocatively nuanced.... Rhapsodic with wonder, electric with cautionary facts and insights, Powers' profound and involving novel illuminates the conundrums of human nature."
NOVEMBER 2024 - AudioFile
"The fate of continents is written in water," this audiobook professes, and the vital role of the ocean is at the heart of this expansive listening experience. Here, especially at the start, it is wise to let the narrators' words flow forth, immersing the listener in four central characters and the minute details that comprise their respective worlds. Sections lack titles or labels, so the distinct voice of each narrator is key to distinguishing which story is which. Initially, the listening experience is intimidating, but once each voice is established, and whose part of the tale is clear, the plot clarifies, too. All six narrators' performances are equally deft; in fact, there is a consistency in pace and tone that makes this complex story accessible. L.B.F. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2024-06-15
A story of friendship, technology, oceans, and a small island.
Powers juggled nine lead characters inThe Overstory (2018), his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel. Here he wrangles just four, but the result is almost as complicated. Two nerdish boys, Rafi Young and Todd Keane, bond in high school over chess and Go. In college, Rafi falls in love with Ina Aroita, a Hawaii-born Navy brat whose mother is Tahitian. The men fall out shortly after brainstorming over Todd’s idea for a computer game called Playground. This strand of the novel is told in retrospect by Todd at age 57, addressing an unidentified “you,” after he receives a diagnosis of dementia with Lewy bodies; he’s an unreliable narrator in more than one way. Interspersed are scenes in later years on the French Polynesian island of Makatea, scarred by phosphate mining and down to a population of 82, including Rafi and Ina and the novel’s fourth lead, an elderly Canadian scuba diver named Evelyne Beaulieu. Her lifelong love of the diversity and preciousness of aquatic life provides the book’s other narrative strand and its environmental theme. Through Todd, Powers sketches the computer and social media revolutions, from early coding to gaming to AI. The counterpoint to this high-tech history is Makatea, a paradise lost to industrial mining that decades later must decide whether to accept a consortium’s lucrative proposal to use the island to build floating autonomous cities. This is a challenging novel, fragmented but compelling, with fine writing on friendship and its loss and on the awe and delight the ocean inspires. Along with its environmental warnings, the book carries an intriguing look at the ways people and animals play, as in the boys’ competitive chess, the antics of manta rays, the allure of computer games, and what a meta-minded author might do with his readers.
An engaging, eloquent message for this fragile planet.
