If boredom could kill, this book would have done me in for sure.
Emma is an artist at Gemini, copying priceless works of art for an elite clientele who want to enjoy their art but don't want to run the risk of something happening to it. So they commission Gemini to create an exact replica that they can display. One of Emma's biggest clients is a Russian billionaire with shady ties to the art world. When he asks more and more from her, she just goes and does it all without question.
First, let's think on this for a minute. What could possibly be happening to the copies Emma is creating? It's obvious, right? Well, that's indeed what happens and it's the whole story. I thought, with art forgery being such a fascinating topic, that I would find this story dazzling and riveting. Instead, what's in my head turned out to be more interesting than what's actually happening in the pages, and I don't even know anything about art.
This story suffers from a real lack of imagination. Quick, what do you think of when I ask you for a wealthy Russian oligarch? All the vodka you can drink? Check. Extravagant parties with caviar? Check. Private planes with many bathrooms? Check, check, check. And that's it. There was nothing else in addition to this parade of banality. Even though that's just one example, it is the crux of the problem with this whole story.
The characters aren't any better. Emma is the among the blandest and possibly dumbest main character I have ever read. She mostly gapes and stares at everything, and occasionally comes up with some dull/awkward one-liner to say, which makes me cringe so hard. What's even more strange is that her words are treated as if they're the funniest and most clever things anyone's ever uttered and that she herself is the most special of all people. Like at one point, she's working in a gallery selling art, and she says some simple words to a buyer, and he immediately buys the art. She's then congratulated effusively by her coworkers, as if she's some sort of art-selling god that has graced them with her presence.
And it's not just that she's bland, but that she's also a walking and talking cliché of what a twenty-something is. Even though she's dull as a brick, everyone wants to be her BFF. Some random guy smiles at her once, and she obsesses over him, acting as if they're going out. She starts an Instagram account, and we are forced to read her every middling post and track her follower numbers, which go from the thousands to the millions in like two weeks (she being special and all).
Because Emma has zero personality, the author does something which I find super annoying, which is to give her a random trauma in order to make her seem three-dimensional. She's afraid of fire, which is mentioned as often as possible, every time someone lights up a cigarette, or she's eating in a restaurant with a little candle at the table, or she sleeps and dreams of fire. How is it even relevant to the story? It's not, but it does fluff out the pages.
Speaking of fluffing the pages, it feels like the whole book is just boring and irrelevant details, one after another. Details should advance the plot or the characters, but in this case, there is no discernable plot or characters, so they are just random tidbits added for page count. For example, whenever a scene has a few people in it, there would be many sentences establishing where every person is standing/sitting in relation to everyone else. Who cares.
For the vast majority of this book (250 pages), nothing happens. Then the last 50 pages finally gets to the development that I've been waiting for. But the kicker is that it's not even a surprise; it really is exactly what I thought it would be just from reading the blurb.
This book killed me. How can such an interesting premise turn into such a dull non-story, with the blandest characters and the lamest dialogue and one cliché after another? Everything in here was so obvious. There was no surprise, no insight, no spark of imagination. You can skip entire paragraphs and pages, and not miss anything. Or better yet, just skip the book altogether.
Readaroo Rating: 1 star
My heartfelt thanks for the advance copy that was provided for my honest and unbiased review.
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