Review of Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart

*Vera, or Faith* by Gary Shteyngart (2025). Published by Random House.

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

This blog post is interesting to me because lately, I’ve been struggling to get in my reading time. I was working for the longest time as a freelancer and contractor, but recently pivoted to an 8-5 job where I’m in an office. It’s not hybrid, so I’m always at home trying to put the puzzle pieces together of how I’ll get my reading done. I also continue working on this blog when I’m not at work, so the Instagram reels I’m fed about a 5-9 feel too real right now.

Anyways, I am trying to find that time to read here and there. Somehow I’m still on track for my Goodreads goal, even though I’ve been slowly giving up on the notion of reading goals in life. I think they can be a little too much pressure and takes the fun off of reading at the end of the day, and I want to read because I want to stay in touch with literature while also pursuing my side career as a writer.

Today’s blog post is about a book I randomly found on the Internet being reviewed at an online publication (where, specifically, evades me right now—I’m writing this a bit of time after I originally found the book’s existence online). I thought that the synopsis was pretty interesting at the time, and it was short enough that I could read it in one sitting.

So I requested it from my local library, and when it came in I was ready to read it. It also helped that there was a huge line of people behind me who also wanted to read it, so when I checked it out I literally had less than three weeks to read the book. It was a good thing it was short, as I was able to finish it in less than two hours with my normal reading pace.

Let’s get into the review! I feel like I’ve been rambling too much in my introductions, so I don’t want to bore you with the mundane details of how we collectively ended up here.

In a dystopian United States, a young ten-year-old girl tries to make sense of the world and her parents’ failing marriage.

Our main character in this novel is Vera, who, at the start of the novel, is ten years old. Half Jewish and half Korean, she wants to know who her birth mother is, but this is one of the many mysteries that’s going to haunt her throughout the course of the novel. Her stepmom and stepmom argue quite a bit, but there are bigger broader problems outside of their home.

This novel takes place in a dystopian world where voting rights are being eroded from people, and despite Vera’s age, she’s able to see how everyone around her is impacted by democracy that’s in a major decline. She often makes lists of the vocabulary words she wants to understand, but also of how the world is different than expected.

Having been born into a Russian, Jewish, Korean, and New England WASP family, she also has a different perspective on things. While her brother Dylan is someone who looks white and fits the bill, half-Korean Vera is physically different when you look at her. Her father is also editing a failing magazine/publication, but with all of the current moment politics he finds himself suddenly in favor of certain people because he has Russian heritage.

When Vera goes to school, we see how she has only three wishes in the world: to make a friend, have her father and stepmother stay together, and to find out who her birth mother is and actually meet her. She thinks that if she meets her birth mother, all of the universe’s secrets are fair game to find out in life.

We don’t get a ton of perspective into the world that she inhabits though because this novel is told from the perspective of a literal child. We see there’s technological innovation out on the street and in their daily lives, but other things are still the same, especially when it comes to race and social class politics.

Other things are being upended by the eroded democracy as well, even if Vera is content playing chess with AI every night instead of actually talking to people. The core aspect of this novel, which reflects in the title, to me is the fact that this little girl still has that childish hope in the world, which is something many begin to lose around her age.

Overall Thoughts

This is a fairly short and predictable novel, but I think it reflects a very interesting moment in American politics, economics, and our lives. I write this in the first year of Trump’s America, and, if we’re going to be honest, everything I studied in graduate school about authoritarianism is coming into play right before our eyes.

So to see this novel depicting our country with eroded freedoms, even with all of the innovation we could have, really hits in a specific way at this moment of my life. Even though our protagonist is a child—and I think she’s written decently, even though she does has the mannerisms of an adult at times—she still is observant of what’s going around her.

Yet she still has that hope, which I called childish before. She has hope for a better future for her family, even though we, as the adult readers, may have doubt, and for her own personal goals. All she wants is a friend and her original mother to meet with her. Those are such simple and mundane goals for a universe in which the world may seemingly be falling apart around her.

All of this is to say I found this novel fascinating, although it was too short. I wanted more from it in the end, even though I understand why the author kept it the way it was. I’d read more from Shteyngart in the future; I had not heard of him before picking this book up.

Definitely give it a chance if you’re interested! As I wrote before, it’s a quick read.

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