Image source – Amazon
“I will tell you honestly: Like everyone, I thought that the ocean was infinite and could not be harmed. I was wrong. The waters are warming. The large fish are disappearing. Plastics and metals and poisons are concentrating all the way up the food chain. And worse is yet to come …. Without your love, the ocean will die.”
Richard Powers, Playground (2024)
Playground is a layered, thoughtful novel that exposes the gap between what we’re building and what we’re losing. Richard Powers shows us the absurdity of thinking we can outbuild grief, out-code loss, or engineer our way past human responsibility. It’s a send-up, with real tenderness. It left me thinking about what matters, and what slips away when we’re not looking.
I’m someone who reads for character. I want to read about ordinary people doing the best they can with what they have. I want to feel close to the people on the page, to care about their choices, to sit with their joy and their pain. With Playground, I didn’t feel that same connection. Their voices felt distant, as if they were there to carry themes more than to live out real emotional lives. I could see what the book was doing, and I admired its scope, but I didn’t feel myself inside it.
Where the novel did reach me was through the story of the island of Makatea. Those passages felt different. Grounded. Devastating. The descriptions of how the island was mined for phosphate, how it was turned into a moonscape, stripped bare, and abandoned, were some of the most affecting in the book.
“When the phosphate mines closed, Makatea capsized.”
What struck me was how familiar the pattern felt. The locals didn’t want to work in the mines, so labour was brought in from Japan, China, Vietnam, and across the Pacific. It’s a pattern we’ve seen repeated: when profit is the only goal, we outsource the hardest work and displace the consequences. The industry leaves, and the place it hollowed out is left behind. That part of the story felt very real to me.
For me, the island’s story held the emotional weight. Not the imagined future of tech, but the very real cost of forgetting what we destroy to build it.
It left me thinking about what matters, and what slips away when we’re not looking.
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