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A review by themermaddie
The Fraud Squad by Kyla Zhao
1.0
hey what if gossip girl was set in singapore and the main character was an insufferable version of jenny humphrey except none of the plot feels relevant or makes sense?
it's been a while since i've read a book with such an unlikeable main character. sam is just so deeply annoying and ungrateful at every turn while somehow also getting so unbelievably lucky at everything??
okay so maybe i'm crazy but i kind of felt like the premise to this book doesn't make sense, but i was drawn in by the elements in the summary anyway. i was expecting this scrappy working class girl to work her way up through high society with her wits and some trickery, even if the end goal didn't seem like a long term attainable goal. what was her plan once she got "to the top"? the only possible outcome seemed like lying to the rest of the socialites forever? did sam not think that once she made all these connections they would be so taken with her that they would just overlook her lies? granted, it's not like she actually lied (only through omission) but clearly she knew that she had to lie bc otherwise they wouldn't accept her, so once again i have to ask, what was the plan girl???
even beyond that, from the very beginning this plan seemed extremely weighted in sam's favour. how is this plan supposed to benefit tim? "to prove that people should be able to do anything they want in life regardless of the circumstances of their birth"? girl be so fucking for real right now. comparing the constraints of tim's life with the constraints of sam's is unbelievably tone deaf; yes i understand how stifling tim's life is but you're comparing this man WHO IS A BILLIONAIRE'S SON whining about being unable to pursue his artsy life's passion to sam's mother who is literally drowning in debt to loan sharks. i don't understand how sam's first reaction to tim's problems is "omg we're so same same!" like girl he canNOT be that sexy. anyway how was tim turning sam into a socialite supposed to prove anything to his parents? wouldn't his parents just get mad at him for lying to them? WHICH THEY DO??
i'm truly trying to figure out why half of the shit in this book even happened bc i swear for most of the story it felt like each scene was just a non-sequitur from the last. first of all, there is no scrappy working class girl climbing the ranks with her devious and deceptive wit; in fact, theres not social climbing at all, because sam starts the book already knowing anya. through anya she meets tim, who is literally already at the top of the social ladder, he's so powerful and influential that sam technically didn't need to do all that work networking, tim literally could've just called some ppl and pulled strings and sam could've gotten her s-gala invite from DAY ONE. he literally was already besties with missy!!! what was the point of any of this if he could've just helped her get a job from the beginning!!! all that nepo baby guilt and THIS is what he decides to put his energy towards????
i'm having such a hard time formulating my thoughts because the more I think about it, the more I have criticisms for literally every single thing that happened.
One of the most glaring things that stuck out at me from the beginning, was how seemingly easy it was for Sam to "infiltrate" the socialite circle. She didn't actually make any friends besides Daisy, and even that was later. the entire time she stays close to Anya or Tim, and she manages to make it quite far in her social climbing journey even without making other close friends, which is further proving my point that she didn't need anyone else because she already had Tim! but it honestly should not be that easy to get into the socialite circle because I swear Sam has one nice conversation with whoever it is that she's trying to impress and they just instantly offer her whatever it is that she wants from them, and like, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't do that? like I fully understand being at a social function and just assuming that everyone else there is at the same social status as you, so I don't blame the people that she's trying to schmooze for assuming that she is also rich, but I DO find it hard to believe that in a setting where people are supposedly obsessed with who you are and how much money you have that they wouldn't ask who Sam's connections are.
another big thing that stood out to me was how much this book loves the bourgeoisie. it was giving big bootlicker energy, yknow? Like this sort of story generally has a plot that it's supposed to follow, it's the Mean Girls formula: loser girl wants to infiltrate the cool crowd, but then ends up getting way too into it and has to remember her roots as to not get swept away by the glamour of being in the in crowd. it's a tried and true formula for a reason. instead Sam is literally just drinking the Kool-Aid, and even Tim, who supposedly has been very critical of high society through his secret gossip column (WHICH BASICALLY MAKES HIM DAN HUMPHREY BY THE WAY BUT WE DONT HAVE TIME TO TALK ABOUT ALL THAT), never actually has any serious criticisms about the issues with the privileges of the upper class.
like there's so much genuinely interesting discourse about class disparity, and the wealth gap in singaporean society that could've been addressed here that was just completely swept under the rug for the most shallow surface level commentary; I swear every event that Sam went to her internal monologue was just about how she's not from this world, or comments about how much money everything costs, and how something is five times the monthly salary her mother makes or whatever. i already KNOW it's all expensive; could I bother you for a crumb of actual discourse instead of the milquetoast commentary we ended up with? again, with the Mean Girls formula the reader understands that by the end of the story, Sam is meant to learn that all of the effort of pretending to be upper class is not worth it if she loses herself in the process. that is definitively not what happens here. instead she gets rewarded for her efforts, ONCE AGAIN through Timothy pulling strings on her behalf like the simp he is, and other people cover for her ass and she gets the job she wants in the end. What am I supposed to take away from that? that all of this was worth it in fact because high society is good, actually? i'm all for glamour, escapism, capitalist fantasy, etc., but at least make it feel worth it. where's the scheming? where are the scams and hijinks? where's the fraud? WHERE'S THE CRIME? none of these 'important' people feel actually important because all of them just give Sam exactly what she wants like immediately after meeting her additionally, none of them are mean to her? Like being mean is not a prerequisite for being rich obviously, but the way the socialite circle is described is clearly meant to be exclusive and insular, when actually basically everyone was nice to her?? I thought it was supposed to be a cutthroat socialite world; is the cutthroat socialite world in the room with us??
even Lucia, who was supposed to be the villain and who was at times cartoonishly evil, got a monologue towards the end of the book during which she displays actual humanity and we get to learn her motivations behind her actions this entire book. it actually makes her a lot more likeable and as a reader you understand why she acted the way she did. She's clearly meant to be a foil to Sam, both as a love interest for Tim and also in the different ways that she and sam approach playing the socialite game. Lucia could've been a really great character to show the different ways people choose to play the cards they've been dealt; throughout the entire story, Sam insists on being independent and constantly pushes back against her mother's wishes for her to get a rich husband, because she wants to have success on her own two feet. on the flip side, you have Lucia who was born into wealth, but as a girl her traditional parents judge her value by how successfully she can bag a husband of good social standing. it's not that Lucia is ditzy or shallow or stupid, it's just that she has decided to play the game with the tools at her disposal; she knows that in her world the only way she'll get far is if she learns how to be a good trophy housewife. that's a great foil to Sam's character and I would've loved for that to be expressed more, but unfortunately, Sam is too shallow and shortsighted of a character to recognise Lucia's humanity even when Lucia is trying to explain it to her, because the only thing that Sam takes away from Lucia's speech is that she thinks Lucia is callous and was pretending to be in love with Timothy. Lucia even explains to her that it's not about how much she loved Tim but that they both understood any relationship they had would always have some degree of transactionality which is again, A VERY INTERESTING AVENUE TO EXPLORE.
I know I'm reading way too deep into this, because I know this was just supposed to be a lighthearted cinderella-esque story yadda yadda, but I feel like there were so many interesting things that could've been done here and just were never touched on at all. Sam gets so close when she talks about how she used her obsession with magazines about the rich and famous as escapism in her childhood from the poor living conditions that she and her mother had to struggle through, and that's why she's always chasing this dream of working at S so that she can be in closer proximity to the socialites. what I would've loved is to have seen Sam get up close and personal with the socialites and realise that the real events behind the scenes were not as nice as the magazine features (I recognise that she does have this experience with Anya and Tim and even to some extent Daisy, but again, she already had access to Anya and Tim, which kind of defeats the point of infiltrating high society if she already knew these people), because while Sam is in her socialite cosplay she just seems to venerate the socialites even more, putting distance between herself and her mother and her best friend, but once again, there's no critical discourse around it. with both her mother and Raina, she keeps blowing them off because she's busy, but I just think it would've been really interesting to analyse the shame that she feels around the circumstances of her birth that causes her to be cruel to the people that she loves. I was just so surprised that resentment as an emotion was never brought up in the fights that she has with her mother or Raina, because I can imagine that Sam might feel resentment towards either one of them just for being poor and the resulting shame that comes from that resentment. I certainly think that Sam does resent her mother based on the way that she treats her in the book, all the little snipes and cruel throwaway comments that Sam directs at her mom are way too frequent for them to just continuously be an accidental slip of the tongue. every loaded interaction Sam had with her mom seemed to skirt around this unspoken resentment and I think that would've been a really interesting avenue of their relationship to explore especially with her mother's continued insistence for Sam to get a rich husband. they both suffered in different ways from the death of Sam's father and the resulting debt that he left them in and I think that it would've been interesting to dig into the different ways they coped with that grief because it feels like there's just so much there; instead we get a very surface level "sorry I was mean to you mom" scene.
I kind of don't even want to touch Anya and Tim (I'm going to because I hate myself), but like, we need to talk about the fact that they are essentially the same, except only Tim gets forgiven by the end while Anya is cut off. at the core of it, both of them are stinking rich yuppies who have never known anything besides the cushion extreme wealth, but who both have complexes surrounding the specific social status and expectations demanded of them by society. that in itself is fine because I can understand how they would feel those pressures, but also both of them were selfish in the way that they treated Sam as a pawn through which they both wanted to act out their own agendas: Anya wanted to use Sam as a pet project and ego boost to make herself feel better about her unstable high society status, and Tim wanted to use Sam as a pet project to assuage his nepo baby guilt about being handed the job that she desperately wanted. I get that Anya was more duplicitous at the end because she tries to cover up what she did, but she also was genuinely remorseful and tries to apologise to Sam after she realises the harm she's caused. from the moment that Tim realises what's going down at the gala, he starts trying to apologise to her, and that's great at all, but it's also so baffling to me that Sam doesn't recognise that both Anya and Tim committed the same sin of treating Sam like a play thing, and like she's disposable. it ultimately ends up being an attitude thing; at the end of the day, neither Anya or Tim have ever encountered a problem that they couldn't solve by throwing money at it. Sam gets so close to recognising this as well because she says "I can't be bought" but then she DOES get bought?? Tim ends up selling his soul to his parents and bailing her out of this PR crisis, effectively throwing money at the problem until Sam gets to keep the job that she wants. and she just forgives him! because he's sexy! and rich! while writing Anya off entirely even though they did the exact same shitty thing!
okay I've already talked about this book for way too long so I need to stop before my brain explodes, but basically all of the characters in this book are horrible selfish people and the only person I liked at all was Sam's poor mother who worked her ass off for her entire life and just wants her daughter to not have to suffer from the same financial insecurity as she has, and Sam is so ungrateful towards her the entire book. justice for mom and EAT THE RICH
where was the fucking FRAUD smh
it's been a while since i've read a book with such an unlikeable main character. sam is just so deeply annoying and ungrateful at every turn while somehow also getting so unbelievably lucky at everything??
okay so maybe i'm crazy but i kind of felt like the premise to this book doesn't make sense, but i was drawn in by the elements in the summary anyway. i was expecting this scrappy working class girl to work her way up through high society with her wits and some trickery, even if the end goal didn't seem like a long term attainable goal. what was her plan once she got "to the top"? the only possible outcome seemed like lying to the rest of the socialites forever? did sam not think that once she made all these connections they would be so taken with her that they would just overlook her lies? granted, it's not like she actually lied (only through omission) but clearly she knew that she had to lie bc otherwise they wouldn't accept her, so once again i have to ask, what was the plan girl???
even beyond that, from the very beginning this plan seemed extremely weighted in sam's favour. how is this plan supposed to benefit tim? "to prove that people should be able to do anything they want in life regardless of the circumstances of their birth"? girl be so fucking for real right now. comparing the constraints of tim's life with the constraints of sam's is unbelievably tone deaf; yes i understand how stifling tim's life is but you're comparing this man WHO IS A BILLIONAIRE'S SON whining about being unable to pursue his artsy life's passion to sam's mother who is literally drowning in debt to loan sharks. i don't understand how sam's first reaction to tim's problems is "omg we're so same same!" like girl he canNOT be that sexy. anyway how was tim turning sam into a socialite supposed to prove anything to his parents? wouldn't his parents just get mad at him for lying to them? WHICH THEY DO??
i'm truly trying to figure out why half of the shit in this book even happened bc i swear for most of the story it felt like each scene was just a non-sequitur from the last. first of all, there is no scrappy working class girl climbing the ranks with her devious and deceptive wit; in fact, theres not social climbing at all, because sam starts the book already knowing anya. through anya she meets tim, who is literally already at the top of the social ladder, he's so powerful and influential that sam technically didn't need to do all that work networking, tim literally could've just called some ppl and pulled strings and sam could've gotten her s-gala invite from DAY ONE. he literally was already besties with missy!!! what was the point of any of this if he could've just helped her get a job from the beginning!!! all that nepo baby guilt and THIS is what he decides to put his energy towards????
i'm having such a hard time formulating my thoughts because the more I think about it, the more I have criticisms for literally every single thing that happened.
One of the most glaring things that stuck out at me from the beginning, was how seemingly easy it was for Sam to "infiltrate" the socialite circle. She didn't actually make any friends besides Daisy, and even that was later. the entire time she stays close to Anya or Tim, and she manages to make it quite far in her social climbing journey even without making other close friends, which is further proving my point that she didn't need anyone else because she already had Tim! but it honestly should not be that easy to get into the socialite circle because I swear Sam has one nice conversation with whoever it is that she's trying to impress and they just instantly offer her whatever it is that she wants from them, and like, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't do that? like I fully understand being at a social function and just assuming that everyone else there is at the same social status as you, so I don't blame the people that she's trying to schmooze for assuming that she is also rich, but I DO find it hard to believe that in a setting where people are supposedly obsessed with who you are and how much money you have that they wouldn't ask who Sam's connections are.
another big thing that stood out to me was how much this book loves the bourgeoisie. it was giving big bootlicker energy, yknow? Like this sort of story generally has a plot that it's supposed to follow, it's the Mean Girls formula: loser girl wants to infiltrate the cool crowd, but then ends up getting way too into it and has to remember her roots as to not get swept away by the glamour of being in the in crowd. it's a tried and true formula for a reason. instead Sam is literally just drinking the Kool-Aid, and even Tim, who supposedly has been very critical of high society through his secret gossip column (WHICH BASICALLY MAKES HIM DAN HUMPHREY BY THE WAY BUT WE DONT HAVE TIME TO TALK ABOUT ALL THAT), never actually has any serious criticisms about the issues with the privileges of the upper class.
like there's so much genuinely interesting discourse about class disparity, and the wealth gap in singaporean society that could've been addressed here that was just completely swept under the rug for the most shallow surface level commentary; I swear every event that Sam went to her internal monologue was just about how she's not from this world, or comments about how much money everything costs, and how something is five times the monthly salary her mother makes or whatever. i already KNOW it's all expensive; could I bother you for a crumb of actual discourse instead of the milquetoast commentary we ended up with? again, with the Mean Girls formula the reader understands that by the end of the story, Sam is meant to learn that all of the effort of pretending to be upper class is not worth it if she loses herself in the process. that is definitively not what happens here. instead she gets rewarded for her efforts, ONCE AGAIN through Timothy pulling strings on her behalf like the simp he is, and other people cover for her ass and she gets the job she wants in the end. What am I supposed to take away from that? that all of this was worth it in fact because high society is good, actually? i'm all for glamour, escapism, capitalist fantasy, etc., but at least make it feel worth it. where's the scheming? where are the scams and hijinks? where's the fraud? WHERE'S THE CRIME? none of these 'important' people feel actually important because all of them just give Sam exactly what she wants like immediately after meeting her additionally, none of them are mean to her? Like being mean is not a prerequisite for being rich obviously, but the way the socialite circle is described is clearly meant to be exclusive and insular, when actually basically everyone was nice to her?? I thought it was supposed to be a cutthroat socialite world; is the cutthroat socialite world in the room with us??
even Lucia, who was supposed to be the villain and who was at times cartoonishly evil, got a monologue towards the end of the book during which she displays actual humanity and we get to learn her motivations behind her actions this entire book. it actually makes her a lot more likeable and as a reader you understand why she acted the way she did. She's clearly meant to be a foil to Sam, both as a love interest for Tim and also in the different ways that she and sam approach playing the socialite game. Lucia could've been a really great character to show the different ways people choose to play the cards they've been dealt; throughout the entire story, Sam insists on being independent and constantly pushes back against her mother's wishes for her to get a rich husband, because she wants to have success on her own two feet. on the flip side, you have Lucia who was born into wealth, but as a girl her traditional parents judge her value by how successfully she can bag a husband of good social standing. it's not that Lucia is ditzy or shallow or stupid, it's just that she has decided to play the game with the tools at her disposal; she knows that in her world the only way she'll get far is if she learns how to be a good trophy housewife. that's a great foil to Sam's character and I would've loved for that to be expressed more, but unfortunately, Sam is too shallow and shortsighted of a character to recognise Lucia's humanity even when Lucia is trying to explain it to her, because the only thing that Sam takes away from Lucia's speech is that she thinks Lucia is callous and was pretending to be in love with Timothy. Lucia even explains to her that it's not about how much she loved Tim but that they both understood any relationship they had would always have some degree of transactionality which is again, A VERY INTERESTING AVENUE TO EXPLORE.
I know I'm reading way too deep into this, because I know this was just supposed to be a lighthearted cinderella-esque story yadda yadda, but I feel like there were so many interesting things that could've been done here and just were never touched on at all. Sam gets so close when she talks about how she used her obsession with magazines about the rich and famous as escapism in her childhood from the poor living conditions that she and her mother had to struggle through, and that's why she's always chasing this dream of working at S so that she can be in closer proximity to the socialites. what I would've loved is to have seen Sam get up close and personal with the socialites and realise that the real events behind the scenes were not as nice as the magazine features (I recognise that she does have this experience with Anya and Tim and even to some extent Daisy, but again, she already had access to Anya and Tim, which kind of defeats the point of infiltrating high society if she already knew these people), because while Sam is in her socialite cosplay she just seems to venerate the socialites even more, putting distance between herself and her mother and her best friend, but once again, there's no critical discourse around it. with both her mother and Raina, she keeps blowing them off because she's busy, but I just think it would've been really interesting to analyse the shame that she feels around the circumstances of her birth that causes her to be cruel to the people that she loves. I was just so surprised that resentment as an emotion was never brought up in the fights that she has with her mother or Raina, because I can imagine that Sam might feel resentment towards either one of them just for being poor and the resulting shame that comes from that resentment. I certainly think that Sam does resent her mother based on the way that she treats her in the book, all the little snipes and cruel throwaway comments that Sam directs at her mom are way too frequent for them to just continuously be an accidental slip of the tongue. every loaded interaction Sam had with her mom seemed to skirt around this unspoken resentment and I think that would've been a really interesting avenue of their relationship to explore especially with her mother's continued insistence for Sam to get a rich husband. they both suffered in different ways from the death of Sam's father and the resulting debt that he left them in and I think that it would've been interesting to dig into the different ways they coped with that grief because it feels like there's just so much there; instead we get a very surface level "sorry I was mean to you mom" scene.
I kind of don't even want to touch Anya and Tim (I'm going to because I hate myself), but like, we need to talk about the fact that they are essentially the same, except only Tim gets forgiven by the end while Anya is cut off. at the core of it, both of them are stinking rich yuppies who have never known anything besides the cushion extreme wealth, but who both have complexes surrounding the specific social status and expectations demanded of them by society. that in itself is fine because I can understand how they would feel those pressures, but also both of them were selfish in the way that they treated Sam as a pawn through which they both wanted to act out their own agendas: Anya wanted to use Sam as a pet project and ego boost to make herself feel better about her unstable high society status, and Tim wanted to use Sam as a pet project to assuage his nepo baby guilt about being handed the job that she desperately wanted. I get that Anya was more duplicitous at the end because she tries to cover up what she did, but she also was genuinely remorseful and tries to apologise to Sam after she realises the harm she's caused. from the moment that Tim realises what's going down at the gala, he starts trying to apologise to her, and that's great at all, but it's also so baffling to me that Sam doesn't recognise that both Anya and Tim committed the same sin of treating Sam like a play thing, and like she's disposable. it ultimately ends up being an attitude thing; at the end of the day, neither Anya or Tim have ever encountered a problem that they couldn't solve by throwing money at it. Sam gets so close to recognising this as well because she says "I can't be bought" but then she DOES get bought?? Tim ends up selling his soul to his parents and bailing her out of this PR crisis, effectively throwing money at the problem until Sam gets to keep the job that she wants. and she just forgives him! because he's sexy! and rich! while writing Anya off entirely even though they did the exact same shitty thing!
okay I've already talked about this book for way too long so I need to stop before my brain explodes, but basically all of the characters in this book are horrible selfish people and the only person I liked at all was Sam's poor mother who worked her ass off for her entire life and just wants her daughter to not have to suffer from the same financial insecurity as she has, and Sam is so ungrateful towards her the entire book. justice for mom and EAT THE RICH
where was the fucking FRAUD smh