Paperback, 384 pages
English language
Published by Mariner Books.
In 2006 Julia Lerner is living in Moscow, a recent university graduate in computer science, when she’s recruited by Russia’s largest intelligence agency. By 2018 she’s in Silicon Valley as COO of Tangerine, one of America’s most famous technology companies. In between her executive management (make offers to promising startups, crush them and copy their features if they refuse); self promotion (check out her latest op-ed in the WSJ, on Work/Life Balance 2.0); and work in gender equality (transfer the most annoying females from her team), she funnels intelligence back to the motherland. But now Russia's asking for more, and Julia’s getting nervous.
Alice Lu is a first generation Chinese American whose parents are delighted she’s working at Tangerine (such a successful company!). Too bad she’s slogging away in the lower echelons, recently dumped, and now sharing her expensive two-bedroom apartment with her cousin Cheri, a perennial “founder’s girlfriend”. One …
In 2006 Julia Lerner is living in Moscow, a recent university graduate in computer science, when she’s recruited by Russia’s largest intelligence agency. By 2018 she’s in Silicon Valley as COO of Tangerine, one of America’s most famous technology companies. In between her executive management (make offers to promising startups, crush them and copy their features if they refuse); self promotion (check out her latest op-ed in the WSJ, on Work/Life Balance 2.0); and work in gender equality (transfer the most annoying females from her team), she funnels intelligence back to the motherland. But now Russia's asking for more, and Julia’s getting nervous.
Alice Lu is a first generation Chinese American whose parents are delighted she’s working at Tangerine (such a successful company!). Too bad she’s slogging away in the lower echelons, recently dumped, and now sharing her expensive two-bedroom apartment with her cousin Cheri, a perennial “founder’s girlfriend”. One afternoon, while performing a server check, Alice discovers some unusual activity, and now she’s burdened with two powerful but distressing suspicions: Tangerine’s privacy settings aren’t as rigorous as the company claims they are, and the person abusing this loophole might be Julia Lerner herself.
The closer Alice gets to Julia, the more Julia questions her own loyalties. Russia may have placed her in the Valley, but she's the one who built her career; isn’t she entitled to protect the lifestyle she’s earned? Part page-turning cat-and-mouse chase, part sharp and hilarious satire, Impostor Syndrome is a shrewdly-observed examination of women in tech, Silicon Valley hubris, and the rarely fulfilled but ever-attractive promise of the American Dream.
I'm not usually into spy/crime fiction but I found this to be a fun, breezy read about life in Silicon Valley. Some elements (everything in the novel set in Russia) felt a little-over-the-top but the Silicon Valley part feels true-to-life (sometimes a little too true-to-life).
Julia Kall’s mother abandons her in a Russian orphanage. Through a clever trick she comes to the attention of higher-ups and parlays that into a release from the orphanage and an eventual computer science degree. On graduating she’s trained by Russian intelligence, after which she’s given stolen American technology and worms her way into in Tangerine, a Facebook-like company in Silicon Valley. She rises to be chief operating officer, then she goes to work. Alice Lu also works for Tangerine, brought in as part of an acquisition made by Julia. One day Alice runs a security audit, and notices unusually high outbound traffic from a server in Dublin. She logs the anomaly, setting the story in motion.
When I finished The American Senator by Anthony Trollope I wanted there to be a Trollope for today. Kathy Wang isn’t that — she’s not as expansive and is much less polite — …
Julia Kall’s mother abandons her in a Russian orphanage. Through a clever trick she comes to the attention of higher-ups and parlays that into a release from the orphanage and an eventual computer science degree. On graduating she’s trained by Russian intelligence, after which she’s given stolen American technology and worms her way into in Tangerine, a Facebook-like company in Silicon Valley. She rises to be chief operating officer, then she goes to work. Alice Lu also works for Tangerine, brought in as part of an acquisition made by Julia. One day Alice runs a security audit, and notices unusually high outbound traffic from a server in Dublin. She logs the anomaly, setting the story in motion.
When I finished The American Senator by Anthony Trollope I wanted there to be a Trollope for today. Kathy Wang isn’t that — she’s not as expansive and is much less polite — but she is as sharp an observer and knows how to weave a good story through complicated subtexts. Impostor Syndrome isn’t (or isn’t only) a spy or corporate-espionage thriller, it’s a social (and, at the end, political) story of the kind Tom Wolfe wanted writers to produce. Wang’s satire is keen and exacting, even when her targets are barn-sized in their broadness, and her humor is slightly tilted to reveal the irony, which makes it all the more pointed and wicked, yet still deft.
