Imposter Syndrome by Kathy Wang (HarperCollins)

Julia is the second highest executive in one of the most prominent tech companies in the world. Alice Liu works in tech support, one of the lowest echelons of this company. Julia is famous, rich, and intimidating. Alice is remarkably easy to ignore. Julia, her picture-perfect husband, and their new baby are prominently  featured in expensive magazines. Alice puts on sweats the minute she comes home to the apartment she shares with her cousin Cherie, whose only connection to the world of tech comes from the CEOs and VPS she dates. Alice is a graduate of MIT. Julia’s education has come from the SPB, the best intelligence agency in Russia.

Pulled from a Moscow orphanage by Leo, a recruiter who is now her handler, Julia is given stolen facial recognition software purloined from a company so gigantic that its loss is inconsequential. “Something to remember about America,” Leo tells her, “waste is part of their culture.”

After her launch of VisionMatch, Julia becomes an integral part of Tangerine, the social network that is used all over the world. Her power is unassailable to the point that she even challenges Leo. Unfortunately, the SPB never gave her a grounding in Greek mythology and the dangers of hubris.

Silicon Valley is a place where status and position reign and the plebian principles of democracy are as ignored as Alice Liu. However meritocracy extends even to Alice’s level. She would never have been hired without her prestigious degree, which she has only achieved because of her intelligence. Behind her drab exterior lurks a very proficient brain that’s bored with her daily tasks. Crawling under the desks of tech magnates as she fixes their phones isn’t the way to network, although it does give her access to unguarded conversations. Alice hears a lot but doesn’t realize the importance of this until the evening she notices unusually high activity in a server in a data center. “There’s a lot of data being transferred,” she remarks to a coworker, “Does that seem off to you?” Her colleague dismisses this but Alice is intrigued by the amount of data being transferred at the end of the day.  She pursues the matter and discovers God Mode, through which a handful of elite users are able to see anything that appears on Tangerine: browsing, messaging, and posting, anywhere in the world. Through God Mode, Alice finds out the name of the user who has downloaded all of the data that first sparked her curiosity. It’s Julia. But why?

This is only the beginning of Imposter Syndrome, a novel that owes a lot to the Aesop fable of the Turtle and the Hare, with flash and flare pitted against dogged brainpower. It’s a book that dazzles with so many facets that it’s hard to keep track of them all: the subterfuge of the intelligence community, the cut-throat world of high tech, the juggling act of successful women who struggle to balance career, marriage, and motherhood, and the debilitating effects of sexism and racism on women of color as they work within a system that’s rigged against them. Kathy Wang dissects all of this with a sharp blade of satire, taking no prisoners, leaving no victors. Everybody has something to prove and a lot to lose. As Alice says in her last words, “But this isn’t the end of anything.” (AI, anyone?)~Janet Brown