I’m here to tell you about my favorite 2025 book I’ve read this year: Gary Shteyngart’s Vera, or Faith. In this book review of Vera, or Faith, I’m going to tell you why I loved it—and why I think it’s one of the most important new books published this year.
In this Vera, or Faith book review, I’ll discuss the premise of the novel and then focus on why I love it: 1) How Shteyngart pulled off writing Vera, his ten-year-old heroine, 2) The comedic genius of Vera’s father, Igor, as well as how comedy counteracts tragedy in the novel, and 3) Where the “Faith” in the book’s title comes in.
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Premise
We’ll start out this Vera, or Faith book review with the premise. Our heroine is ten-year-old Vera. Her father, Igor, is a Russian immigrant and editor of an underfunded left-leaning magazine. Vera’s Korean American birth mother left not long after she was born. Vera is raised by her stepmom, Anne Mom, who comes from a long line of New England WASPs. Vera has a mischievous younger brother, Dylan.
The novel starts at the beginning of Vera’s fifth-grade year. Vera wants just three things. First, to save Igor and Anne-Mom’s rocky marriage. Second, to finally make a friend at school. And last, to track down her birth mother, “Mom Mom.”
Set in the not-too-distant future, the novel takes place in a frighteningly plausible dystopian America. Women crossing state lines are subject to Cycle Checks where the state of their womb is checked. Even ten-year-old Vera is forced to give blood in a finger prick to make sure she’s not pregnant.
Most of all, the Five-Three movement looms on the horizon. This initiative, to be voted on by states in upcoming conventions, would give people like Anne Mom and Dylan five thirds of a vote in elections because of their family’s heritage, but it would leave out immigrants, like Igor, and the children of immigrants, like Vera.
Now let me tell you why I think this novel succeeds.
Analysis
Next in this Vera, or Faith book review, we’ll explore how Shteyngart pulled off this masterful dark comedy.
Vera: A Kid on the Edge
As a regular reader (and writer) of kid lit, I felt that Vera, or Faith features the most true-to-life ten-year-old protagonist I’ve ever encountered. I think Vera’s relationship with language is the main reason why.
Vera straddles the adult and kid worlds. You see it on every page with how Vera relates to language. Vera constantly uses words and phrases she doesn’t quite understand, setting them off in quotation marks.
For example:
Her parents fought every day on a variety of subjects, but especially about he she and Dylan were to be raised. Anne Mom wanted a lot of structure, but Daddy said childhood “should just happen,” like it had happened to him, and that until you went to grad school “nothing really mattered,” it was all just a “neoliberal frog-march of the damned.” (p. 6-7)
You can see here how much of what she hears from adults goes over her head. What does it mean, to Vera, that “nothing really mattered” until grad school? Probably not much. But we, the reader, are able to grasp the meaning, which is part of the fun, and a part of why this novel is so funny. This rings true about being a kid, wanting to be sophisticated like the adults and be a part of “grown up world” but still stuck in a kid’s body (and mind). That’s why Vera feels so real to me. The omniscient narrator puts you inside her brilliant, inquisitive, and, of course, not fully developed mind, in such a way that I think is so accurate for many kids.
In an ongoing gag, Vera’s future—her destiny—is already written by the adults in her life: she will go to Swarthmore College thanks to her Daddy’s “connections” and one day be “a woman in STEM,” a career she doesn’t quite understand.
After receiving a “bad” grade on a quiz in math class, Vera worries: “Now she would never be a woman in STEM” (76). Vera tells her AI chess set Kaspie about the fallout from the math quiz: “Daddy says he has the connections to get me into Swarthmore and Dylan into Colgate, but with a B in math it might not be feasible.’ She liked using the word ‘feasible.'” (79) She then asks about her chances of getting into MIT, and Kaspie replies: “Swarthmore is ranked number four among national liberal arts colleges,’ Kaspie said. ‘It is nothing to sneeze at.'” (79)
(Confession: I grew up near Swarthmore, and I know people would get their claws out if Swarthmore was ranked at anything less than America’s top liberal art college.)
As Vera writes in a haiku about herself:
The shy girl
With her beautiful cheekbones
A woman in STEM (161)
I couldn’t have written this Vera, or Faith book review without including this laugh-worthy haiku.
Is there a better response to the encroaching dystopia America than arming ourselves with comedy that’s as sharp as any weapon? In this distorted yet totally fathomable future America, you can either laugh or cry. I choose humor, I choose this novel.
A Farce of a Father
When I wrote this Vera, or Faith book review, I knew I wanted to focus on Igor, a brilliantly drawn character, who uses his dark sense of humor as a shield against his own deep insecurities as a public “intellectual,” a word Vera constantly associates with her father. Igor’s cynical, sardonic commentary on living in the literati community of this warped America is hysterical.
(photo credit: Penguin Random House)
Vera keeps a list of Igor’s positive qualities to present to Anne Mom. Vera includes, first and foremost, “He’s an intellectual” along with “Edits a magazine for smarties,” and “Is funny most of the time” (10). Through Vera’s eyes, we see Igor as an “intellectual” hero, and, according to Anne Mom, Vera “worships” her father.
Igor’s self-image is fragile, as is his inner desire for acclaim (and money). At a dinner out, Vera notes:
Daddy started to “pontificate” about what would happen after the constitutional conventions passed Five-Three. He sounded like he was on television. He even sometimes turned to look out of the corner of his eye because he liked to be “recognized,” but the people at the adjoining table were just “a bunch of tourists” who did not appreciate the intellectuals in their midst (70-71).
My late father was my hero when I was ten years old, too. I definitely worshipped him like Vera worships Igor. He was my idol, as I’ve written about here on the blog before. He had a doctorate. He was a high school English teacher, a poet, and, like Igor, an intellectual who, his later years, loved to read The New York Review of Books cover to cover. When I was way too young, I would pull the books his students read—The Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby—off the floor-to-ceiling bookcases lining the walls of his study and try to decipher them as keys to understanding my father. Maybe that’s why this dynamic resonates so much with me. I see myself in Vera, and I see my dad in the best version of Igor, too.
Who Are the Adults Here?
Perhaps the most cutting critique of contemporary America that Vera levels is at how the adults have failed the children growing up in this increasingly more dystopian version of our country. How could an initiative like Five-Three (which is already echoed in today’s “Heritage American” fad) or the implementation of Cycle Through policies (which aren’t all that different from period trackers asking if women are pregnant) happen here? Because the adults in charge will have let it.
Maybe kids like Vera must be the real adults in America. Because the adults are acting like kids.
More than a subtle theme, this argument is right there in the prose:
“Some people just aren’t very nice,” Daddy said when they entered their apartment, the living room now strewn with the kind of “cheap” political literature Daddy detested. He sounded like a ten-year-old when he said it. “I’m sorry, Daddy,” Vera whispered. She wanted to remind him that Bloomberg thought he was a “man we might need to take seriously,” but Anne Mom huffed in and very loudly declared it to be bedtime” (75).
As we see in this quote, Igor, often self-absorbed and, in many cases, unable to properly parent, reminds Vera of kids her own age. And what has Igor really done to resist the warped future of the nation in which his children will grow up? He lies on the couch, preoccupied by social media:
“Social media work is work,” he would say whenever Anne would chide him for being “absent” to his kids. “It’s what keeps the lights on around here” (27).
Conversely, Anne Mom fights back by holding a fundraiser against the Five-Three movement.
Even Vera’s teacher Ms. Tedeschi regrets how her students they have to age up in the current climate:
Ms. Tedeschi spoke of the importance of kids being ‘in the know.’ ‘I hate calling you “kids,”‘ she said, ‘because in times like these, you have to grow up fast.’ Vera smiled at this—she wanted to grow up super fast’ (19).
In a world like Vera’s, why wouldn’t she want to “grow up super fast”? Somebody has to be the adult around here, and it’s not going to be Igor.
Ms. Tedeschi believes her students can rescue the country:
‘But we’re not just mindless puppets,’ Ms. Tedeschi said…’We’re still participants in our country’s destiny and we still have a voice.’ Yeah, but kids can’t vote, Vera wanted to say. But she knew not to be negative when Ms. Tedesci sounded so positive.” (20)
Ms. Tedeschi asks her students to grapple with Three-Five issue directly through a Lincoln-Douglas debate with one team (Vera and her new friend, Yumi) arguing for Five-Three and another team arguing against Five-Three.
At the end, Anne Mom, whom Vera now calls “Mommy” after learning the truth about Mom Mom, subverts this topsy turvy swap. Anne Mom reassures Vera that the nation’s fate is not her responsibility.
Mommy took Vera by the shoulders and looked down and into her eyes. “I have to—” Vera started to say.
But Mommy wouldn’t let her finish. “What do you have to?”
“I have to—”
“You’re only ten,” she said. Her voice was a mother’s voice and it would brook no argument.
“You’re only ten,” she said.
In this upside down world, the destiny of the country that’s been run into the ground by the “adults” in charge is in the hands of the youngest citizens. Finally, on the last page, Vera learns Mommy might be right: “I’m only ten,” she repeated. It was what her mother wanted to hear and just maybe it was true” (241)
It’s no coincidence that Vera’s name means “faith,” hence the title Vera, or Faith, a revelation Vera learns:
“This was your mother’s idea. She loved the name. The wife of her favorite Russian writer was named that. A wife who was a genius herself, but in the olden times she had to serve her husband.”
This was a surprise to Vera. “My mother named me?” she said. “She named me ‘faith’?” (228-229)
(This is a reference to Vladimir Nabokov’s wife, Véra.)
Vera, or Faith‘s argues that we must have faith in the next generation to clean up the mess of the ones who made it.
With Vera at the helm, I have every confidence they’ll succeed.
And there you have it, my Vera, or Faith book review.
