Bingo square: Relation’ship’
June Hayward is out celebrating her pseudo-friend’s latest literary success (the Netflix deal!) when the unthinkable happens. Athena Liu, rising star of literature, dies in a freak accident in front of June. And June – jealous of her friend’s success and pitying herself for her own publishing woes – steals Athena’s latest manuscript and passes it off as her own. After a little name change and some racially ambiguous author photos, Juniper Song is born. And becomes the latest sensation. But with publicity comes eventual detractors. Twitter and bloggers calling her a plagiarist and racist. Soon June is digging herself in deeper and deeper in an attempt to keep what she believes is rightfully hers – the accolades and attention. But then she starts getting messages from someone claiming to be Athena. Can she stop her spiral and retain her position?
I blitzed through the first half of this book. It’s incredibly fast paced and readable, even with the amount of cringing and eye rolling I did (if this had been a movie I’d have had a cushion in front of my face for most of it, can’t cope with secondhand embarrassment). But June is absolutely awful. Just utterly self-absorbed and oblivious, and being in her head became draining. She keeps getting away with things by the skin of her teeth (and with a fair amount of help from the publishing industry, which is absolutely lambasted by the author here) and then whining about how hard she has it. Initially she rationalises the theft by saying it’s to finish Athena’s work, but if that was the case she could easily have asked Athena’s mother to do so. Later, it becomes more of a revenge for things Athena did to her. But always she lies to herself about her reasons, and comes out the ‘good guy’ in her mind.
I struggled mightily with the second half. It doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be. A critique of the publishing industry and who it decides gets to be the next big thing? A horror story? A thriller? Maybe a ghostly tale? Towards the end, June says:
But I’m losing track of the narrative…I’ve written myself into a corner. The first two-thirds of the book were a breeze to compose, but what do I do with the ending? Where do I leave my protagonist, now that there’s a hungry ghost in the mix, and no clear resolution?
I’m not sure if this is Kuang speaking, maybe winking at us, because that’s what it feels like. Then we get a kind of insane turn with an antagonist that returns out of nowhere, seemingly carrying a grudge for a year (although the grudge is valid). It became pretty exhausting. But I can’t deny it was compelling. And also incredibly depressing to someone who is trying to write her own novel and get published. Do I want any part of this industry? (I do wonder how it reads to people outside the industry too? Is it believable? Interesting? Mundane?)