The blurb:
Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars: same year at Yale, same debut year in publishing. But Athena’s a cross-genre literary darling, and June didn't even get a paperback release. Nobody wants stories about basic white girls, June thinks.
So when June witnesses Athena's death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse: she steals Athena's just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers to the British and French war efforts during World War I.
So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song — complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? Doesn't this piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller? That's what June claims, and the New York Times bestseller list seems to agree.
But June can't get away from Athena's shadow, and emerging evidence threatens to bring June's (stolen) success down around her. As June races to protect her secret, she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.
In the last 15 years or so, there's been an increasingly visible push for diversity in publishing — getting book deals for marginalised authors rather than just the same demographics owning the bestsellers lists. It's a great, necessary movement, and it's given us some terrific books that probably wouldn't have made it out of the slush pile 20 years ago. The names on the Hugo and Nebula nomination lists have changed — since 2010, only three white men have wom the best novel Hugo, for instance (Paolo Bacigalupi and China Mieville tied in 2010 and John Scalzi won in 2013) — everyone else has been female and/or POC). There's also been the inevitable backlash; think Sad/Rabid Puppies and their voting slates. There's also the other, more subtle...I don't know if 'backlash' is the right word, but business decisions like "we already have an x author on the books, don't need another one" that limit publication options1.
That's the world June Hayward is in (and also the world Athena Liu is in, too). She's had a moderately unsuccesful publishing debut, with a book that's won't be going to paperback; all she can see is Athena's success — up and now including a Netflix deal. Jealousy rears its ugly head.
And then Athena dies right in front of June in one of the most blackly ridiculously over-the-top grotequeries I think I've ever read (that's a compliment, by the way) and June has the chance to steal Athena's unpublished manuscript. The manuscript she hasn't discussed with anyone; the manuscript nobody knows anyting about. What's a poor white girl kept off the best-sellers lists by reverse racism to do?
Yup, steals it, edits it, sends it to her agent under her own name. Her publishers later decide to change her name from "June Hawyard" to "Juniper Song" (her real first name plus her middle name — her mother was a total hippy). The cover story is that she's moved into a new phase of her writing life so is changing the name under which she publishes — but her new author photos are also taken so that she looks a little more ethnically ambiguous.
The descriptions of June and her (white) publisher cheerfully butchering Athena's careful research and depictions of WWI British and French treatment of the Chinese labourers in their employ are incredible — names are changed because June can't keep the characters and their name straight; a missionary's daughter who, according to primary historical sources, dumped aid supplies at a camp border because she couldn't bear to go into the camp close to all those dreadful Chinese people is rewritten into a saintly young woman who dispenses aid and comfort with a gentle smile and is rewarded with a chaste kiss on the cheek from Chinese labourers overcome by her etheral beauty; racism from the English and French troops is toned down because it gets boring to read. In interviews, June grants Athena the status of 'inspiration' for the novel, and someone who helped translate primary sources into English for her, but that's all.
At the start, June's reaction to Athena's success is actually kinda relatable. I can see someone having moments of 'why her, why not me?' because publishing is a fickle industry and sometimes great novels languish in slush piles, or just don't take off the way you hope they will — but June descends from there into truly awful levels of entitlement and denial. Kuang documents the whole spiral and the increasing coverups June resorts to really well — we stay with June's point of view the whole time but, maybe beyond that initial understand of jealousy, there's no sympathy given to her, nor should there be.
By the end of the novel, June's been brought undone but in true Scarlett O'Hara fashion, she decides that tomorrow is another day — you can practically see her standing in a field declaring that, as God is her witness, she'll never be unpublishable again, and the levels of self-delusion just keep on rising.
All in all, it's a blackly satirical, bleakly comic read, and I really enjoyed it, read the whole thing very quickly.
1Fun fact about me, I used to be in commercial radio as an announcer in the 90s. All bar one of the stations I worked at would never have more than one female announcer on air because "women don't like listening to other women" or "women's voices aren't distinctive enough to stand out from each other". These reasons are both, of course, total bullshit.
Started: 12 March 2025
Finished: 13 March 2025
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