"Veridian Sterling Fakes It"

Veridian Sterling Fakes It by Jennifer Gooch Hummer

Amazon First Reads June 2024

Pages: 245 Genre: mystery

Rating: 2.5 Star

Kindle Highlights

Veridian Sterling is an art school graduate who is trying to build her art career, but no galleries seem to want her. Luckily, it seems like a gallery assistant job just opened up. It's not ideal, but she needs money — her mom is moving soon, and she's going to be on her own. Her new boss may be awful, but some of the people she works with don't seem so bad. That is, until things start getting suspicious, and Veridian is thrown into a side of the art world she wasn't expecting.

I didn't hate this book. In its favor, the book is short, so it's a quick read. The New York setting was incredibly lively and felt very intentional. And, in theory, the look into the art world (both the ethical and unethical sides) was interesting. Unfortunately, a lot of the execution just ultimately fell flat.

Veridian was a disappointing main character. It felt like the author was trying too hard to make her interesting to a point that it didn't feel natural. Her name is unique and unusual, she's got a random Augustus Waters-type quirk, and she's awkward in an adorably relatable way! All of that is wonderful, but there wasn't enough substance to back it up. Outside of her designated idiosyncrasies, she was bland and passive and clueless. Other than Veridian, the other characters were either caricatures, boring, or just plot devices.

Character issues could've been managed, but there were a ton of plot issues that really took me out of the story. I love the idea of a somewhat goofy (in a good way), lower-stakes (not murder) mystery, but I don't really think that was intentional. It seemed like I was meant to be stressed for Veridian, but instead it seemed like the author was just unsure what book we were writing.

Conflict only existed because of divine intervention. There were far too many coincidences that had to happen for there to be any sense of tension. We weren't watching Veridian's life play out, we were constructing a storyline for a book. Furthermore, it often felt like Veridian, when faced with conflict, would make things harder for herself every time. Yes, that means there's more happening, but it's ultimately drama for drama's sake. It made the whole book feel inauthentic.

The stakes themselves were unclear at best. Veridian treated everything with the same level of intensity, which doesn't work when one problem is slight personal disappointment and the other is a federal crime. I was often uncertain how seriously I was meant to interpret things. Is she literally going to jail for this? Or is she just being dramatic? I never got a good grip on the potential consequences, which made it a lot harder to care.

Ultimately this also just ... wasn't a mystery. Sure, Veridian didn't know things and there was a little bit of an investigation. But that's how book work. The whole "fake art" thing (which I don't think is a spoiler, it's in the title) was a side plot for the first half, and there was nothing to really solve. There are certain crucial elements that should be included in a mystery that were missing. The premise would've landed better in a different genre.

If you see the genre and read the description of the book, you're going to be expecting the mystery to be the main plot, when it doesn't even really take the stage until the second half. This makes the whole plot and conflict of the first half irrelevant, especially when the "mystery" falls flat on its own. I wish more time had been dedicated to the story I was pitched.

The ending was also unearned. Plots were wrapped up in a technically correct way, but none of it was because of something Veridian did. Things just happened to fall into her lap in the same way the conflict was created in the first place: divine intervention.

This book felt like it had all the technical ability to be good, but the actual execution fell flat. I spent so much of the short read time trying to figure out what was going on that I didn't really have time left to enjoy it. I almost think the idea needed to be sat on a little bit longer to work out all the details.