Quick Take
- Narration: Aasne Vigesaa handles Crusie’s overlapping ensemble cast with good comic timing and enough vocal differentiation to keep the three generations of Goodnight women distinct throughout.
- Themes: Identity performance and authentic self, the ethics of deception in a world built on pretense, art forgery as a metaphor for the gap between appearance and reality
- Mood: Gleefully chaotic, fast-talking, and warm, with the screwball energy of a good caper comedy that also has actual feelings underneath it
- Verdict: One of Jennifer Crusie’s strongest ensemble comedies, best experienced with knowledge that Welcome to Temptation, its companion novel, is the tighter of the two.
There is a specific pleasure in discovering a Jennifer Crusie novel at exactly the right moment, when what you need is something that makes you laugh out loud while also being genuinely clever about the mechanics of how people deceive themselves and each other. I came to Faking It on a Friday evening when the week had been too long and the last thing I wanted was something demanding, and found that Crusie had made something that was both effortlessly entertaining and surprisingly thoughtful about identity and self-knowledge. That combination is harder to pull off than it looks, and Crusie has been doing it consistently for longer than most of her readers realize.
The setup is elaborate in the way that classic screwball comedies are elaborate: the Goodnight family runs a respectable art gallery with a deeply unrespectable secret locked in the basement, specifically a collection of forgeries created by the deceased patriarch. Matilda Goodnight breaks into a house to steal back evidence of her family’s history and moral compromise. Davy Dempsey, reformed con man, breaks into the same house to steal back three million dollars his former financial manager funneled to the most beautiful sociopath Davy ever had the bad judgment to sleep with. They meet in a closet in the dark. The resulting collaboration against a shared enemy involves a mutant dachshund, a jukebox stuck in the 1960s, a disgruntled heir, an exasperated hitman, and the growing realization on both sides that they cannot keep performing the people they have been.
The Goodnight Family as Ensemble
What distinguishes Faking It from most of Crusie’s work is the ensemble structure centered on three generations of Goodnight women. Gwen the matriarch who prefers to escape reality, Eve the oldest daughter with her layered identity complications, Nadine the granddaughter who is trying to figure out what path she actually wants before she commits to following in whatever direction the family has been moving, and Tilda the youngest who carries the specific burden of her father’s fraudulent legacy: these four women are distinct from each other in ways that Crusie earns through behavior and interaction rather than description. They are a family that loves each other fiercely while having genuinely different relationships to truth, obligation, and the past.
Aasne Vigesaa’s narration manages this ensemble with admirable clarity. The Goodnight women have different registers, different speeds of thought and speech, and different relationships to the family’s specific form of collective self-deception, and Vigesaa differentiates them without making the distinctions cartoonish or overly theatrical. The comic timing she brings to the family’s collective talent for simultaneously knowing and not knowing things about each other is one of the audiobook’s consistent pleasures. Reviewer Karen K.’s excerpt of the opening line, about Matilda stepping back from her latest mural and realizing that of all the crimes she had committed in her thirty-four years, painting a floor-to-ceiling van Gogh reproduction on a client’s dining room wall was the one that would send her to hell, captures the register precisely: high comic awareness, genuine moral texture, a protagonist who is simultaneously competent and catastrophically wrong about several things at once.
Davy Dempsey and the Con Man Question
The Dempsey family appears in Welcome to Temptation, the companion novel that reviewer D. Rizzo places above Faking It in the Crusie hierarchy with the comparison to Madonna versus Britney Spears, which is critical but fair. Davy is the less prominent Dempsey sibling from that earlier book, and this novel gives him his own arc. The reformed con man premise allows Crusie to do what she does best: examine the relationship between performance and authenticity in a character who has spent his professional life studying both from the inside.
The relationship between Tilda and Davy works because they are both fundamentally honest people operating in situations that require sustained deception, and they recognize that quality in each other before they recognize anything else about each other. That recognition, arriving before attraction, before trust, before any of the conventional romantic markers, gives the central relationship its particular quality of earned intimacy. Reviewer Karen K. was right to lead her review with the opening line because Crusie puts her thematic cards on the table from the first sentence: this is a book about what happens when people who have been pretending stop pretending, and what they find when they do.
The Chaos That Does Not Sink the Story
Crusie’s plots generate peripheral characters who function on the edge of farce and somehow remain completely logical within the world of the novel. The mutant dachshund, the jukebox, the disgruntled heir, the hitman who is genuinely exasperated by the situation he finds himself managing: these elements would sink a less skilled writer into pure comedy that forgets to have any stakes. Crusie maintains enough emotional grounding in Tilda and Davy’s genuine uncertainty about who they are and what they want that the peripheral chaos feels earned and generative rather than decorative. The funniest scenes are also the scenes where the most is at stake, which is the defining quality of screwball comedy at its best.
The honest accounting is that reviewer D. Rizzo is correct that Welcome to Temptation is the tighter, more focused novel, and listeners who come to Faking It without that context will miss some of what the Dempsey world accumulates. But at 11 hours and 23 minutes, Faking It is consistently funny, genuinely affectionate about its entire cast, and more interested in what people do to protect their pasts than most romantic comedies of its type bother to be.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should Faking It be listened to before or after Welcome to Temptation?
Welcome to Temptation comes first chronologically in Crusie’s fictional world and is generally considered the stronger of the two novels. Faking It stands alone well, but the Dempsey family context and some character callbacks reward listeners who arrive from the companion book. If you have time for only one, start with Welcome to Temptation.
How does Aasne Vigesaa handle the ensemble cast and the overlapping comic timing in Faking It?
Vigesaa differentiates the Goodnight women effectively without making the distinctions cartoonish. Her comic timing is a consistent asset, and she handles the novel’s many overlapping plot threads and character interactions with clarity. The screwball pace in the second half of the book is well-managed.
Is Faking It primarily a romance or a caper comedy, and which element gets more emphasis?
Both elements get roughly equal emphasis, which is one of the book’s strengths. The romantic relationship between Tilda and Davy is central, but the caper plot involving art forgery, stolen money, and a cast of peripheral characters with their own agendas gets as much page time and creative energy as the romance.
A review mentions a sequel featuring Nadine being planned. Is that book available now?
As of the time this review was written, a confirmed sequel featuring Nadine had not yet been released. Listeners interested in the Goodnight family’s continuation should watch for announcements from Crusie, who has indicated that the project is planned as part of what she calls her art series books.
