The book is written as a confession, which helps readers get to know protagonists Ava and Winnie, and how their lives detoured toward crime. What it ended up being, however, is exactly what I was hoping when it was first announced by Reese over on the ‘Gram.

I loved the main character development (though you need to have a lot of patience to discover the development. Her husband works far too much and is never home, her son has the lung capacity and soprano that rivals an opera singer’s, Ava secretly hates her job and is glad to be on extended maternity leave, and she doesn’t feel close to her two best friends anymore. Counterfeit is a riveting and energetic novel about a world that so many of us encounter but rarely understand beyond the surface. It has also been recommended by The Washington Post, People Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, Vogue, Time, Oprah Daily, Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Parade, and more. This is a great easy read, it’s clever and fun but with dark undertones as it shines a light on things such as Chinese factory conditions.From the very beginning, I’d known my lot in life: to be good enough at my job, and to tolerate it until retirement. Up until that point, I had never set a story in my homeland of Singapore, featuring Singaporean characters, so I knew that this was a setting and that these were themes that I’d want to revisit.

Enter Winnie Fang, Ava's enigmatic college roommate from Mainland China, who abruptly dropped out under mysterious circumstances. It just has so much in it that you can dig into and it was really fun to have those debates and analysis of character motivation and stuff like that. Later on however, the story switches to Winnie’s perspective and I will admit that, when I read her chapters, I started second-guessing some things that had been revealed earlier (and that’s all I’m going to say about it — you will need to read the book for yourself to find out what I’m talking about). Ava is so dazzled that she doesn’t immediately find it odd that Winnie, who isn’t a connection on social media, seems to know so much about her life.This is one of the most challenging aspects of writing historical fiction – working in the necessary context and information in a way that does not detract from the storytelling. Swift, surprising, and sharply comic, Counterfeit is a stylish and feminist caper with a strong point of view and an axe to grind. In this clever caper (with TV rights already optioned), two Asian American women start a lucrative business selling counterfeit luxury handbags. A reader can’t be faulted for being swept up in Ava’s narrative, for sympathizing with her plight, even rooting for her acquittal.

Recommended by The New York Times Book Review • The Washington Post • People • Entertainment Weekly • Time • Cosmopolitan • Today show • Harper’s Bazaar • Vogue • Good Housekeeping • Buzzfeed • Oprah Daily • Parade • Popsugar • Goodreads • theSkimm • Katie Couric Media • The Millions • and more! The scheme the women run seems surprisingly simple if you are bold enough, and though not without its risks, it seems the financial rewards are high. I think a better way to end this review is that it was a book club pick and boy did we all have a lot to say about it! There are many other problems associated with this book, like the problems with the narration and the way the character's arc was created. That sounds a bit weird to say because the story revolves around a counterfeit luxury handbag operation, but the plot paired with the writing style of the author led to a great reading experience.As a strait-laced, rule-abiding Chinese American lawyer with a successful surgeon as a husband, a young son, and a beautiful home—she's built the perfect life. It seems much easier to make a novel a global success if the authors cater to the needs of readers from other countries according to their misconceptions. The secondary story about Ava's dissatisfaction with her personal life was actually not that secondary. Enter Winnie Fang, Ava’s enigmatic college roommate from Mainland China, who abruptly dropped out under mysterious circumstances.