Please take your seats and ensure to buckle your seatbelts, because this one is a wild ride.

Artifacts by Natalie Lemle feels like it’s been falsely advertised. What I was expecting to be a book about art history, archaeologists, and one woman’s journey through her memories was actually just a murder mystery/organized crime whodunnit.

Upon beginning the book, I was all in, ready to be taken on the journey of unearthing Lena’s past. But as the story continued, I became lost in all of the things the book was trying to accomplish. It felt like the book was four different books wearing the same trench coat trying to pass as a cohesive unit. It was preachy while not feeling substantial enough to contain a valid argument, and it felt as if everything important was told to me instead of shown to me.

One of my favorite things about reading a book is trying to put the pieces together, and I really enjoy the ‘eureka’ moment when I figure it out. While this book could’ve had that with the whole organized crime subplot (that was actually really the plot), it was nowhere near satisfying, because so much of the mystery was told to the reader instead of allowing us to figure it out. It felt as if the author assumed that their readers were dumb and wouldn’t put the pieces together, which is why they included all of the clear cut explanations of what was happening plot-wise. Yet at the same time, the author assumed we’d all know how to translate the lines in Italian????

The disjointed nature of the book is where almost all of my frustration rests. Individually, there’s so much promise in the ideas. It’s their execution that lacks and therefore creates clunkiness. Either the book needed to be longer to give more weight to subplots like that of Lena and Ginny (because really, why was there a family subplot when it felt as if it did not factor into the main plot at all???), or it needed to cut half of its goals and focus on really developing a solid few. Honestly, I think if the book was framed more wholly from the murder mystery/organized crime standpoint, the subtext about the importance of archaeology and excavation of history would have hit much harder. Sometimes, placing ideas under the spotlight actually does them more disservice than letting them speak on their own from off to the side, and this book falls into that trap.

The characters were interesting in concept, but again, not in execution. I lost the desire to care about Lena about a third of the way into the book, and for the sheer number of names to keep straight, the others could at least be more robust and developed. Because why are there so many people and I don’t really care about any of them by the end?

If I had known then what I know now, I would have skipped this (if it weren’t for the sparkly limited time badge). At least if I had skipped it, I would have said “What are we doing?” out loud fourteen LESS times.