The book might seem, at first blush, like a departure for Green, who’s best known for his bestselling young adult novels, such as The Fault in Our Stars and
The rules of K-pop fandom are pretty simple: be loyal. Your boy band must be number one. Be faithful, steady, and true. No one had to teach me the rules for me to know them. I was born and raised in the United States and grew up with K-pop from a distance, the internet at the time a fledgling technological wonder that required a phone line and constant arguments with your parents because they needed the phone, they were waiting for a call, but you also needed the line—you needed to log onto Soompi, the primary Korean American forum at the time, to get more news about H.O.T., the K-pop boy band that established the formula for idol groups that still exists today.
The more we try to live up to those words, the further we get from ourselves. In her spare, cerebral novels, Kitamura reveals how much lies beneath the surfaces of our bodies and our sentences, and how much about one another we cannot know.
If you’re wondering how we arrived at this pass, Carr is your man. An eloquent, levelheaded writer, he has been sticking pins into the hot-air optimism of Big Tech since 2001, when, as editor of the Harvard Business Review, he published several politely skeptical articles on the uses of what was then the new “information technology.” Less politely, and with sharper pins, Superbloom appraises the past and present of that technology and issues a warning about its future.