“Glittering with wit and mystery, FAKE LIKE ME is more than an immensely readable portrait of an artist — it shatters expectations with pointed satire and structural daring.”

“FAKE LIKE ME is an impressively intelligent thriller ... Expect insightful paragraphs about the creative process sprinkled among the propulsive mystery.”

“[A] page-turning story about art imitating life.”

“Bourland has an astonishing ability to write viscerally about art, culture, class, and landscape, for a work that’s bound to be one of the summer’s biggest crime/literary crossovers.”

“In Bourland’s decadent twist on the classic campus novel, a group of struggling artists succeed beyond their wildest dreams, but at what cost? Gloriously mordant and glittering.”

“This book delivers the perfect smart-thriller paradox: you’ll be driven to finish the twisting plot, but you will not want the narrator’s wise observations to end. So drop everything to follow Bourland’s brilliant narrator to Pine City, the upstate artist colony with its crumbling camp buildings and secret histories. You will not see the art world—or a woman’s place in it—the same way again.”

“The process creators go through for the sake of their art ranges from obsessive to self-destructive, and that ideology is escalated with Bourland’s cutthroat prose... The unrelenting threat hovers through the plot and rigidly keeps the reader’s head just above water until the end approaches.”

“FAKE LIKE ME ... is the work of a writer who has hit her stride.”

“A cast of familiar-yet-eccentric characters plays out multiple storylines—a bizarre mystery (why did the young and famous New York artist Carey Logan drown herself in a lake?), a love story (really, a few), an artist’s coming of age—but at its core, it’s a penetrating, insightful discourse into what it means to be a practicing artist navigating the cut-throat art world.”

“Whip-smart”

“Bourland [is] back in fine form ... [FAKE LIKE ME] promises to be the art mystery of the season.”

“Meet ‘art satire thriller,’ your new favorite genre.”

“With her trademark flair and razor-sharp attention to detail, Barbara Bourland offers the reader an incisive exploration of the tension between the desire to make art and the desire to make money. FAKE LIKE ME is satirical, brilliantly realized, and has a twist you simply won’t see coming...”

“A ridiculously propulsive ‘du Maurier-esque’ literary thriller and a warning about the deadly consequences of stifling female expression. Could. Not. Put. It. Down.”