I read this back in February (’25) and made notes for it, but I never got those notes put up into a “review.”

Playground 
by Richard Powers,  2025
Read by Edoardo Ballerini &  a small cast
Winner of Pulitzer Prize fiction 2024
Rating 9.5 / General Fiction

Todd Keane and Rafi Young are high school students in Illinois – both are brilliant students and become fast friends over chess. Todd id White, Rafi is Black. Their life paths seem to follow each other from meeting and falling in love with an Hawaiian woman, Ina Aroita, through inventing a fortune in Silicon Valley and more. \

But this book is about two very contemporary young men with differences about money, race a young woman and so on. It’s beautifully written with plenty to think about.