Artifacts is bogged down by an execution that makes a genuinely interesting premise feel overcrowded and underdeveloped.

The themes presented by Lemle have great potential. Artifacts has an interest in archaeology and who is allowed to write history, exploring how stories change depending on who controls the narrative and how the past carries different meanings depending on who claims it. Unfortunately, the book does not fully develop these ideas, and they remain promising background noise that neither shape the rest of the story nor Lena's personal arc.

The major issue with Artifacts is its overwrought descriptions, abstract jargon, and niche references. It's possible to write a book that includes niche material and uses it well, but Artifacts fails to make its specialized material useful to the narrative. References are fine when they are integrated into character, atmosphere, or theme, but in Artifacts, it felt more like sediment burying the rest of the novel's genuinely interesting components.

As someone with zero interest or knowledge in any of the topics presented, the insistence on these details felt muddy and confusing. Paragraphs upon paragraphs felt more like a lecture than a compelling narrative and made it difficult to follow the specifics of the plot, let alone connect with any of the characters.

The heavy use of Italian felt especially grating and created a weird narrative distance. Since Lena is fluent in Italian, by not translating the Italian passages, the reader is locked out of information possessed by the protagonist, which interrupts alignment with her as a character. These structural issues served as amplifiers for smaller issues that would have otherwise been negligible or forgivable.

Lemle tries unsuccessfully to balance a mafia mystery, a legal procedural, a traumatic family history, and an academic tone. Each narrative thread twists and stumbles in its own clumsy way. The mafia subplot adds danger but not much substance, while the family subplot involving Lena's sister and mother has emotional potential but is never fully interrogated. As a result, the novel feels busy without feeling rich.

Artifacts immediately introduces a relatively sizeable cast of characters who serve an important function but are thin and underdeveloped. They each hold a small key to the plot, but because they are given so little interiority or distinction, they blur together rather than deepening the story, making them feel like plot devices rather than fully realized characters.

Lena has all the ingredients for a fascinating protagonist. She has a deadly, intriguing cocktail of unreliable narrator traits: dissociation, memory fog, and naivete. Though she is a lawyer, she is herself an archaeologist of sorts, going back in time to unearth memories and histories and rewrite the story she once told herself to believe. The potential for connection between Lena's character arc and the overarching themes of historical preservation was incredibly compelling.

Ultimately, Lena's character feels uncontrolled. It's difficult to understand her motivations or to feel invested in what happens to her. Her job as a lawyer feels more like a necessary plot device rather than a meaningful part of her characterization. Since the story deals with questions of ownership, history, and justice, her legal background could have been utilized to deepen the book's themes, but it never feels fully integrated.

When the author does take the time to address the larger questions introduced at the beginning of the book, it feels like the summary to a thesis. Characters talk at each other about the importance of cultural preservation, about the benefits and failings of museums and historical sites. A single mention at the very beginning of the book is given to the complicated colonial histories of artifacts and state ownership, and the topic is never meaningfully addressed again.

The narratives wrap up with a tidy bow, with convenience rather than emotional payoff or complex outcomes. Thematically, Artifacts culminates in a resolution that feels politically rancid. The ending imposes a clean administrative solution backed by private tech infrastructure and surveillance, which feels out of place in a book that sets up questions about contested memory and the instability of history.

The novel's interest in the idea that artifacts and people hold multiple histories means that ending with a "true history" flattens the entire premise. The whole point should be that histories, cultural or personal, are historically entangled, not that they have one recoverable truth that can be state-certified.

An ending that should feel liberatory feels stale and coldly corporate. Ironically, it retroactively rewrites the entire claimed purpose of the book and makes everything land with even less force.

I received an ARC of this title in exchange for an honest review.