Hello to all of you beautiful nerds and welcome back from traveling the vast nerd universe! I am back with a book review!

The Fake by. Zoey Whitall

Disclaimer: This review is based on thoughts and opinions from the writer of this blog. Please respect her thoughts! You have been warned!

Synopsis

From the writer of The Best Kind of People comes a new story where a scammer who can weave many stories ruin two people’s lives. Shelby lost her wife and is going through a major bout of grief and a family who tries to come in and help her out but then finds out about a grief support group where she meets Cami, who is also going through grief herself of losing her sister and coming over cancer. Once they start becoming friends, Shelby allows Cami to live with her and help her out with getting Cami back on her feet except red flags start to sprout about Cami.

Gibson is fresh from divorce and starts living on his own in a small apartment and goes out with friends one night when Cami spots him from across the room and they start dating. He also tries to help Cami by helping her with bills and other things to get her back on her feet as well until he meets Shelby and that they notice that her stories are not lining up such as the cancer and dead sister. 

Thoughts

Man, it feels good to get back into book reviews because it’s something I had enjoyed and haven’t gotten to reading for a while due to school and work. Now that I dusted my Kindle off I am back into it! Anyways, I did like this book due to how it took an interesting turn. It was a one character vs. two since Cami is the scammer and she is scamming two people with her lies throughout this book. At first it started with Gibson since he was just out of his divorce and was getting back into the dating game and when Cami and his eyes met that was when he got caught in the web and took her home with him. She does start off with the cancer story by saying that is her final treatment that day and then went into the sister story as well and as I read the book I kind of got sunken into what Cami may say next. I did like how one of Gibson’s friends caught one of her lies by noticing that she mentioned one of the favorite bands they listened to and tried to help Gibson out right then and there. Of course, he would shake the worries off like with most scams, heck I thought the same with Stratton at first. Then we have Shelby who lost her wife and is looking out for herself by keeping herself healthy and not going down the same route if things happen, for instance she was afraid of throat cancer since she had a hard time swallowing, it does show she is going through major anxiety while grieving most of the time and when she meets Cami it calmed her down throughout their interactions and while Cami lives with her. Shelby was being a big mother role model towards Cami with how she was taking care of her but when she was noticing things were not adding up that was when the relationship decided to take a turn. When she and Gibson meet each other over dinner, they were told about each other that were not right like how Shelby was mean and completely hated men due to being a lesbian and Gibson was a gambler but after how they saw each other being who they really are, such as Gibson not being a gambler when he had police after him with suspicions of theft, they decided to work with each other to help Cami. I felt that towards the end they wanted to end Cami’s lying by having an intervention after figuring things out. I did like the part when Shelby confronted Cami in front of the grief support group since everyone didn’t want to tell her that Cami was bad news at first and Shelby just really broke the truth and left the room afterwards and even told the head of the group that they were toxic for that.

Rating: 4 Shooting Star Pawprints out of 5

I did like the book and how Whitall started the story off by showing Gibson first and how he meets Cami at the bar with his friends and then Shelby with the grief group a little bit later. Getting both characters’ backgrounds at different intervals gave a great appeal to this book but I feel that Cami’s background in how or why she started lying and scamming was not being explained enough. I think that should be placed somewhere since towards the end Lauren tried to bring her and Cami;s mom to help with finding out why things went the way they went and Shelby wanted to see where it stemmed from. I wanted to know where it stemmed from as well. But the book was good in the end with what we got to see.

Well, that’s it for this book review! I am currently reading the last book I have in one of the series I have been reading for over two years now so I can finally do the review in one big review. So, until next time!