after seeing the incredibly mixed reviews, i was a bit concerned going into this book, considering i am not at all the target audience (i.e. i don't particularly enjoy ancient history or artifacts).

however, i was pleasantly surprised!

while reading (or listening, in my case) to natalie lemle's Artifacts, you can tell the deep care and reverence she holds for her subject matter, as well as the amount of research she put into this novel. she studied classics and art history at tufts, so this subject is probably dear to lemle's heart. fiction about artifacts is rare, and lemle may have thought this as a love letter to a community she cherishes! for that, i respect her writing about a topic that doesn't necessarily hold mainstream popularity/a big selling point.

the only thing is (and probably my biggest complaint about this book) you have to have a working understanding of Italian to understand some parts of the book, since there are parts where full-blown Italian conversations occur. i understand that it was (probably?) assumed the readers could pull out their phone and translate... but on audiobook, that's not exactly possible. (can we normalize writing the sentence in English and saying, [character] said in [language]? i swear this used to be the norm)

this novel is also very... convoluted? it started out fine, but as the book went on, i began to lose track of events. part of it was the point of view switching to the past and back to the present at cliffhanger times, which (i guess?) is to build suspense, but the thing is, this isn't meant to be a suspenseful novel. i'm still not sure what exactly made Lena estranged from her parents, and i wish this topic was delved into more instead of "this is the way it is." i found the book to end quite abruptly, and the ending left me with questions that i wish were answered.

this didn't affect my final rating of this book, but my audiobook rating of two stars is because of the confusion with the italian sentences, as well as i found the accent work by the narrator to be... not great.

i would recommend this novel to a very specific subset of people- those who are interested in ancient history and artifacts (specifically the Mediterranean/Italy). if that's not your vibe (like me!), you may still enjoy the story. overall not at all a bad debut and i would be willing to read future works of lemle's!