I loved the title of this book. Spy books are not some thing I would pick however I thought I’d give it a chance.
Once I got into it I enjoyed it but it took me a while to get to that stage. There are lots of pov’s within this book and that’s something that can get overwhelming for me.

Overall I enjoyed this book however I don’t think I would reread it.

Julia Lerner is a Russian spy, carefully selected and groomed to be an asset in Silicon Valley. But Julia is not exceptionally talented or brilliant, apart from in her hunger for success. She is spotted in a Russian orphanage and recruited because she is competent but ordinary. Her handler, Leo, thinks this will both allow her to blend in, and stop her getting above herself.

Julia is given an identity heading a startup with stolen software, which she then sells to tech giant Tangerine. She joins Tangerine’s board and soon proves herself indispensable. She is living a life she could never have dreamt of, after her impoverished and lonely childhood. Then Leo shows up with a list of demands – he wants information on Tangerine users, information which the company claims to its users it can’t access. Julia knows different.

Alice Lu, meanwhile, is a mid-level technical employee at Tangerine, dealing with personal and professional frustrations. She is someone who hasn’t quite achieved what her Chinese immigrant parents envisaged for her, wondering where her life is going, how she’s going to pay her rent. She diligently performs some system checks (checks which are supposed to be done regularly but which everyone else skips) when she realises someone is viewing and downloading private data. She soon works out it is Julia and has to decide what to do with the knowledge.

I was totally absorbed in Imposter Syndrome. Julia and Alice are both fascinating characters, grappling with their achievements and disappointments from their very different perspectives. At the heart of the novel is the question of what it means to be someone, to be outstanding or to be ordinary.

The social media setting is apt – social media encourages us to mine our lives for incident or individuality. Alice recalls sharing a traumatic event about her past to her then-boyfriend who found it not quite traumatic enough. Julia is constantly spinning her identity as a woman tech founder, trying to project the right qualities for a woman in public life – successful but not threatening, powerful but feminine. (There is, of course, a gendered element to imposter syndrome, Tony Blair recently claimed he had never even heard the term.) Julia is living, in effect, a triple life – the public figure, the Russian spy and, most elusive of all, the ‘real’ Julia.

The espionage element of the plot also highlights contemporary concerns about privacy and data on billionaire-owned platforms. The detail about life working for a tech company – both at the top and at the lowly level occupied by Alice – was fascinating and there are some great comic set-pieces highlighting the absurdity of tech culture. It was also amusing to read that the code in Tangerine isn’t up to scratch and no one can be bothered to fix it (anyone who has ever grappled with customer service on the big tech platforms, even as a paying customer, will not be surprised).

Julia’s life as a Russian spy, and Alice’s attempts to thwart her, add a cat-and-mouse element to the plot which keep it moving, but it’s about much more. (Being a spy feels like just one more thing Julia has to juggle, along with career, family life and media appearances.) You can enjoy Imposter Syndrome as a pacy, entertaining thriller, or as a fun satire on Silicon Valley, but it’s also asking profound questions about identity. Perhaps we are all imposters in our own lives.
*
I received a copy of Imposter Syndrome from the publisher via Netgalley.

Impostor Syndrome has excellent characterisation and is unexpectedly funny. It reveals big tech to be like a hive, with worker bees, drones and an untouchable queen bee. Julia may be a spy but she most wants to be left alone.

I went into this with high expectations - pitched as a cat and mouse spy thriller - but it was a little disappointing in the end. It wasn't entirely thrilling and the plot sort of plodded along for most of the book.

Some of the characters were reasonably well developed, but there were a lot of side characters that took away from the story.

Overall I'd rate this as 2 stars as I expected it to be much more entertaining than it was.

Impostor Syndrome is full of impostors in one way or another, but of sufferers of the clinical syndrome, perhaps less so, as everybody seems pretty sure of their abilities and right to be doing what they do. The title, on the other hand, is cleverly used to make you think of the social elements which have made the condition popular, and how it often refers to... women.

This is not a novel of espionage per se, but a novel about a very particular spy: Julia. The story traces the arc of how Julia became a Russian agent, with Leo, a Russian intelligence agent her Pygmaleon, how she was sent to the US to make her way in Sillicon Valley... and once she had climbed to the top... This super entertaining narrative manages to mesh the world of big tech, social media, women in the workplace, power, data control, state espionage, aspiring migrants, entitled men, San Francisco, Moscow... into, for me, a totally compelling, fun and intelligent narrative that I read non-stop and found both funny, intelligent and well structured through a mixture of plot advance and character discovery. I rooted for Julia and Alice Lu (her nemesis?!) equally, wondering how would the endgame pan out... Strongly visual, with great sense of place, excellent dialogue, believable characterisation and loads of satire... I would love to read a second outing of these characters, if this was *that* sort of novel.

I am afraid that I struggled with this book, I just didn't connect with it .I found it too slow ,and I had a hard time with it .Hope others like it more.

I wasn't particularly wow-ed by this book, but it was an entertaining read. I liked the characters, and I found Julia's internalised misogyny made her a very interesting character and her POV chapters were generally my favourites. The pacing was slower than I expected for a spy thriller, but this is mostly because the narrative gives the story enough time to flesh out its characters and its themes. Aspects of the novel that I liked were the corporate hierarchy of Tangerine that reflect the realities of working lives, such as junior employees spotting mistakes but fear losing their jobs if they point it out to their superiors, and how concepts of dream careers are soon replaced by dreams of a stable income.
All in all, I wouldn't re-read this book, but I liked its discussion on corporate America, feminism and internalised misogyny, and the tech industry as a whole.

Julia Lerner’s willingness to work hard sees her handpicked from the newest crop of Muskovite graduates: just twelve years later she is COO of Tangerine, one of the world’s most valuable technology companies, instantly recognisable as a icon of women in business and about to marry her long-term boyfriend in a lavish wedding in the Napa Valley. But she’s also a Russian spy.

Julia and her long-term handler Leo have reached a comfortable understanding, but new orders come from Russia’s State Protection Bureau (SPB) directing Julia to use Tangerine’s bewildering (yet worryingly believable) access to people’s accounts to track and report on enemies of the state. Julia bristles at the breach of privacy and intrusion into her business, and the mammoth risk she runs of getting caught - but is she willing to refuse the SPB and lose her extremely comfortable existence?

Meanwhile, on the absolute bottom rung of Tangerine’s precarious career ladder sits Alice Lu, a 35-year old tech support worker who flags unusual activity on one of Tangerine’s servers during a routine inspection, discovering the mysterious ‘User 555’. A few curious clicks lead her to the mythical ‘God Mode’ which grants users access to anyone’s messages, search history, posts – but who could be using this? Surely not the COO?

A bitingly prescient and gripping satire on gender, race, greed and workplace culture – and a must-read for anyone working in tech.

Featured in the February edition of Cambridge Edition Magazine

I really wanted to like this as I was sucked in by the hope of similarities of the Elizabeth Holmes situation but unfortunately, this was a really slow read for me. I ended up giving up 30% of the way in.

This book predominantly follows Julia Lerner and Alice Lu. Julia was brought up in a Russian institute (equivalent to an orphanage) and as an adult was recruited to work for SPB, Russian spy agency. She now lives in Silicon Valley and is a chief operating officer for Tangerine, a social network. She is married to Charlie and pregnant with their first child.

Leo, Julia’s contact, increases his demands in terms of what the SPB requires of her: she needs to run ‘deep searches’ on certain individuals and transferring their Tangerine data, which is a huge breach of privacy and trust. Julia is very reluctant to do it, as she has worked so hard to be where she is now. This suggests she has some moral, albeit low, compass.

On the other hand, we have Alice, one of Tangerine’s employees who notices unusually high activity on one of the servers, performed by a User 555. Alice is adamant she must uncover the identity of this person, unknowing that Julia becomes aware of her presence…

I had such high hopes for this book – I liked the storyline and the pace of the book, however, there were certain elements I disliked. I didn’t really warm to any characters, which is quite unusual for me, as I can always find someone to relate to, or feel sympathetic towards. The description of the FBI investigation was too vague for me, I wanted more details.

A mixed bag for me, but this book might appeal to other people.

Thank you to the publisher, Verve Books for approving my NetGalley request.

Impostor Syndrome encapsulates our Facebook anxieties perfectly. Outstanding… absolutely amazing… just wow!… this book is exquisite. Absolute gripping.

I very much enjoyed this book think The Americans meet the Queens Gambit
The subject of the book a Russian who was taken from an orphanage to be groomed into becoming a spy sent to USA to infiltrate silicone valley tech companies was immediately appealing and grabbed ,y interest quickly . the story held as firmly as we follow this young lady in her meteoric rise up the company to COO.
I loved the description of her character which was incredibly devious and self serving and liked the struggle that was described between her desire to retain her trappings of success in one hand whilst serving her puppets masters with the other. Perhaps a bit far fetched but it made good reading and an exciting novel
I liked her relationship with her handler who was the man who had picked her from the orphanage
The book is fast paced and exciting with a degree of foreboding about what will happen next which always makes a good page turner

This one was a bit slow for me. Unfortunately it was a DNF but I'm sure it will be appealing for others.

Wanted to love this but I ended up finding it far too slow to be honest. I ended up having to slowly chip away at it because I couldn't stay focused on it for very long. It comes across as confused about what it's trying to be, and the hesitancy meant I never got attached to anyone or invested in what would happen next.

The book is an exploration of the world behind social media and Silicone Valley as well as the struggles that women have in the workplace. Add in some international industrial espionage and questions regarding privacy and you have the basic ingredients for this story. It is written from the point of view of several of the main characters which helps the plot to unfold and gives the reader an interesting perspective on the action. This is a sector I know very little about so it was a fascinating insight into what may go on behind the scenes. The characters were well written and even the less likeable ones were conveyed in an empathic way. I enjoyed the book and will look out for future work by the author. Thanks for the opportunity to read it Verve Books / Oldcastle Books.

I am a great fan of espionage fiction, and this novel literally checked off all of the boxes for me! Kathy Wang is definitely my go-to author at this point!

I feel like this book would make a great movie, it was full of intrigue and twists and turns, and I felt like I really couldn't predict what might happen at the end. It was refreshing to have a book that talked about racism and sexism so honestly and openly. I've never read a book with a plot like this, and it was really great to read something that felt so new. Also, I loved the different settings! Whether it was Silicon Valley or Moscow, each setting felt so visceral.

The first half of the book felt slow at points, and there were a couple of parts where the plot didn't feel completely thought through. I also felt like the book was aiming to be character-driven, but I didn't feel like I'd been given enough time with each character to care about what happened to them. I felt like this had so much potential, but I just felt like there was something missing for me.

The espionage angle of this book is the least important. Above all else it’s a satire of Silicon Valley and it’s issues around race and sexism and it’s deftly handled by Kathy Wang. It’s an interesting read. My only real criticism being that the action jumps around abruptly. We’re often thrown into a flashback or forward and I had to keep checking where I was at and this halts the narrative flow. But above all an engaging read.

Considering how excited I was for this book it felt like a huge letdown! It felt like the author was torn between multiple genres and in the end she never quite settled on one and it made the book feel almost shallow? Even individual characters didn't feel deep enough to keep me engaged. I didn't hate it, but I didn't really like it...meh!

So this book has mixed reviews I think its like Marmite you either love it or you don't and unfortunately I didn't, its a character study of a female Russian spy and I just found it bland and slow going and the ending was very disappointing and the Russian intelligence jargon was lost on me!

I'm just bit confused by it all!