June Hayward is a struggling author, Her one published work, Under the Sycamore Tree (a tale about the complicated relationship she and her sister had growing up, which her sister doesn’t get and doesn’t like) has pretty much fallen off the radar. This is counterbalanced by her friend since college Athena Liu, who has just sold the movie rights to yet another of her books. June wishes she had Athena’s life, but never thinks that will happen until the night Athena chokes to death on a not-fully cooked pancake in front of June, and her yet-to-be submitted manuscript for yet another (most likely to be a hit) book is just sitting there, ripe for the taking. What’s a struggling artist to do? I mean, it’s practically a duty of June’s to publish the work as her own, just to get Athena’s book out there. What follows is a biting satire on the publishing industry, “woke-ness”, cancel culture, white privilege.
Talk about your unlikable, possible unreliable narrators. I am actually not sure how this book got published, with how scathing a satire of the publishing industry and it’s diversification of authors. (“See, we’re not racist, we have plenty of POC authors! And they’ll keep their contracts as long as they write about what we’ve pre-determined their ethnicity would write about.) I loved that a large part of Juniper’s personality was “you know, pointing out my racism is actually pretty racist. Not that I’m racist though; I mean, it’s not my fault that all Chinese look alike. Nor am I to blame that I think all Chinese speak like a bad parody of Peter Sellers from Murder by Death.” I do wonder over the fact that the plot contained a mild criticism over how all publishing will accept from AAPI (mostly Chinese for this point) authors are books about the Chinese and their struggles and the Chinese experience….when both of the books I’ve read by Kuang (this and Babel) are basically about that. I will give points that even though Juniper was quite obviously written to be the biggest b**ch imaginable, Athena had her detractors as well. Though seeing as a) Juniper is telling the story, and b) the two detractors most mentioned are a bitter ex and someone who seems to be gatekeeping the “Chinese-American woman in the publishing world” identity, you really have no idea what Athena was actually like. Maybe she was a pretentious, experience stealing b**ch, maybe she was someone (in my opinion) that was so introverted she basically created a persona to interact with the world; who knows? All I know is that Juniper gives off such unlikable vibes that I instantly side with anyone who isn’t her. Plus Juniper had to be one of, if not the, most whiny, self-pitying, self-delusional, narcissistic yet claims to be empathetic, self-victimizing characters I have read about in a long time. Though the confrontation at “the Exorcist stairs” ended far differently than it probably would have in real life; and hey! Accidental death/murder might have been even better for book sales! I will say there are two times I feel for Juniper; once over her experience in college, and once when she finds out her mother and her sister have been discussing her tax returns; that’s not too illegal (I think.)
All in all, it was a captivating book, made so partially because I had to keep reading just to see how much worse Juniper would get, and how she was going to justify it next. Though it did make me second guess over whether or not I would ever want to get involved with the publishing world.
