The book, When Art Isn’t Real: The World’s Most Controversial Objects Under Investigation, by Andrew Shortland and Patrick Degryse, promises to bring a critical eye to the world of art forgeries and the incentives within the art market that foster an environment in which fakes are accepted as real antiquities. Unfortunately, the book fails to deliver on this important discussion. Each chapter focuses on a single object, but it is hard to see the overarching principle guiding how the chapters are arranged. Objects are not grouped by medium or are in some kind of chronological order; neither are the narratives about the pieces arranged in such a way as to draw out thematic similarities. In fact, the substance of the book equivocates on accepted forgeries, focuses on scientists as personalities rather than on scientific approaches to the study of ancient materials, and often adopts the colonialist view that it proposes to critique.