I am not an artist and I have no idea what it means to be one. So I enjoyed genuinely peeking into the bohemian-like art world for a while.

Our main protagonist stays without a name. She is a thirty-something artist in New York. She is still a nobody although she sold some of her paintings in the past. Now she is about to have her break-through with a new series of paintings. But all this paintings get destroyed in a fire. For some reasons she can’t admit that they are all lost. So she decides to repaint them in an incredible short time without anybody knowing it. Through an old friend she gets an invitation to Pine City, a group of artists who life in a house in the country. This has been her dreams since she started to be an artist. When she was young she witnessed this group performing their art. Their main protagonist was Carey Logan. She was the star and became the hero of out no-name artist. Three years ago Carey Logan committed suicide and Pine City clamed up about that and refuses to talk about her. Now our no-name artist is finally invited into this elusive retreat. But Pine City is a disappointment. It is nothing like she imagined it. And they are still not willing to speak about Carey Logan.

This story is really about art. There are very detailed descriptions what out artist needs for her paintings and how she does them. She is not just painting neat little aquarelles. She makes huge thinks with a lot of material. I would have loved to see them. There is also a lot of talk about other artist which art you can google. I enjoyed that but I also skipped some of the crafty details about producing the paintings. It was sometimes a little bit much.

It was nice to hangout in this world. The characters are not very multi-dimensional and I found our main character to be whiny and needy. She has obviously the potential but she is full of self-doubt and compares herself to Carey Logan all the time. She lacks the enormous self-esteem every other artist in this book has but takes herself far too serious. There is a lot of telling in this book. Not much happens. For the first half our no-name painter is simply telling us how she got where she is now. Even when she arrives at Pine City she is just painting all the time and yearning for the other members to accept her. Not much action here. Toward the end there is a little twist and you see what Pine City was all about. That was nice but also our artist was a bit tiring with her fixation on unraveling the mystery about Carey. “Fake Like Me” was an entertaining read, a little bit on the slower side but with a compelling subject.

A very well written and thrilling romance story. Not my usual genre but I thoroughly enjoyed this unique and interesting story. I’d love to read more from the author. Highly recommended xx