Fake Like Me

Starred review from April 15, 2019
The unnamed artist who narrates this exceptional thriller from Bourland (I’ll Eat When I’m Dead) is finally enjoying success and financial freedom in her career. Then disaster strikes when a fire in her New York City loft/studio destroys Rich Ugly Old Maids, her newest series of seven paintings, which she considered her “crowning glory.” Out of desperation, she assures her gallerist that only one was destroyed. Now she has three months to recreate her large, intricate oil paintings for a Paris show. She secures space at a sprawling former upstate summer resort, the home of art collective Pine City and her idol, sculptor Carey Logan, whose suicide by drowning three years earlier served as a turning point in the artist’s work. She feverishly dives into painting and falls hard and fast for Carey’s paramour, Tyler Savage, soon becoming consumed by the mystery of Carey’s last days, her rumored final work, and what drove her to suicide. Bourland expertly shines a light on the nature of female ambition and desire and the often dark heart of inspiration. Readers fascinated with the blood, sweat, and tears of creating art will be especially rewarded. Agent: Victoria Sanders, Victoria Sanders & Assoc.

Starred review from April 15, 2019
"The history of art is littered with the bodies of dead women." Artist Carey Logan made her name by creating hyper-realistic sculptures of bodies in various states of decay, including one memorable piece where body parts were buried, awaiting discovery. In 2008, Carey filled her rain boots with quick-drying cement and walked into a lake at an upstate New York property owned by her art collective, Pine City. Carey's suicide "opened up the floodgates" for our unnamed narrator, a talented but struggling artist who had admired Carey since a brief but memorable encounter back when the narrator was an art student. In 2011, the pink-haired artist is 34, successful, and still living in an illegal New York loft that doubles as her studio. The series of large-scale paintings she's spent the last two years working on--titled Humility, Obedience, Chastity, Modesty, Temperance, Purity, and Prudence--are scheduled to be shipped to Paris for a show, but they're all destroyed when the loft burns down. In desperation, the artist tells her gallerist that Prudence was the only casualty and is given a few months to fix it. She's able to procure a space at Pine City and is allowed the use of Carey Logan's old studio. The artist throws herself into her work and a passionate affair with Tyler Savage, who makes art out of black-market human organs and was Carey's boyfriend. The other Pine City members are largely standoffish, and her burning questions about Carey and her rumored final work are decidedly unwelcome. The artist's three months at the isolated compound are a menacing, swirling, hypnotic dance of parties, art, sex, and, ultimately, startling revelations. Bourland's (I'll Eat When I'm Dead, 2017) painstaking research on the practical and emotional aspects of making art is on vivid display. Readers eager for a glimpse into the New York art scene will be enthralled, but despite the glitz and glamour, it's frequently a dehumanizing place to be, especially for women. After all, as the gallerist says: "Female painters are the bargain of the century." A haunting, dizzying meditation on identity and the blurred lines between life and art.

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Starred review from June 1, 2019

In 1996, the nameless first-person narrator--then a 19-year-old sophomore art student--has a memorable encounter with Pine City, the collective of five beautiful young artists in New York City. Carey Logan, the most famous of the group for her sculptures made of casts of body parts, speaks to the narrator while casting her hand and becomes her artistic lodestar. Years later, Logan has given up sculpture for performance art; her final piece is filming her suicide. The narrator, having achieved some success with her abstract billboard-sized paintings, is mere months from an exhibit in Paris when her loft burns down, taking with it six of her seven exhibition works. Frantic to find space for reconstructing two years of art in three months, she wangles her way into Pine City's upstate New York retreat, landing in Logan's former studio and in the heart of Tyler Savage, Logan's former boyfriend, as she seeks Carey's real story. VERDICT The creative process confronts reality in this compelling literary thriller centering on art, identity, and deception, as told in Bourland's (I'll Eat When I'm Dead) sharp prose. A must for those with an artistic bent, a sheer reading pleasure for all.--Michele Leber, Arlington, VA

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 1, 2019
An abstract painter on the verge of making a name for herself, the unnamed narrator of Bourland's (I'll Eat When I'm Dead, 2017) second novel loses everything in an electrical fire. Desperate to secretly?fraudulently?remake the monumental paintings expected in her upcoming Paris show, mere months away, she begs her way into a summer residency at Pine City: the exclusive upstate New York enclave of the eponymous five-person artist collective she's admired since she was an art student at their alma mater. She's most inspired by Pine City's star, Carey Logan, who came, like the narrator, from nothing and nowhere, and who famously drowned herself after she changed course in her work and the art world responded negatively. Bourland has an uncanny knack for spatial description and relates artwork and every last thing in Pine City? half Dirty Dancing, half Twin Peaks ?with pristinely observed color and feeling. She also nails the creep factor, and her narrator's high tolerance for it, with foreboding signs that the no-name painter isn't totally welcome there, and that there's more to Carey's story. The deck stacked against her, the narrator tells the glitteringly compelling tale of her fevered summer and wisely reveals meaningful intersections of class, gender, and making art.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)