I use Storygraph to keep track of my book reading to de-Amazon my life. Reviews work a little differently, and you’re asked “Did you find the characters loveable?” For this book the answer is a big NO.
Personally, narratives that engage me with unlikeable characters either end with them getting their karmic payback or learning to be better, if that happens here, we’re not sure. The book is written in the from Juniper’s view, whether she has pragmatic, real-world crash to earth and/or has had some (even minor) ethical breakthrough is less clear – if they have at all. She’s our only narrator, and how much this is just another spin of victimhood left me feeling that while her world had coming crashing down, no emotional growth had happened.
We see through her eyes how she steals the draft of her dead Chinese-American friend’s latest and greatest novel. The story of how she re-writes Athena’s WWI epic and side-steps questions around creative ownership offers the narrative backbone. The lies she tells herself first; “I did most of the work”, “It wasn’t publishable before I re-wrote it” being the two that give us our entry point, but even seeing Juniper through her own unreliable narration, she’s very adept at lying to herself. I spend a lot of time reflecting on why people lie and the theory that we lie to support a positive self-image was ringing in my ears while reading this one. Her lies are very much those we tell ourselves to deflect shame.
These lies carry across in the satire of white feminism and its intersections with the white male-centered far-right, plus the morally bankrupt opportunism of modern capitalism. The usual token gestures of “I voted for Biden” and other phrases are sprinkled throughout, but Juniper also happily courts the attention of the far-right, happy to be championed by them as another “white woman being pushed out by minority voices” when it suits her and her bank account.
It’s framed as a satire, skewering the US publishing industry’s overwhelming whiteness and the token nods it gives to DEI and non-white voices, along with The title hints that the theft of a Chinese-American author’s book—centered on the treatment of Chinese soldiers by Allied forces in WWI—by a white woman, and the “yellowface” of the title, would be a central focus. While it’s a consistent thread, with some intentionally darkly comic moments (the editor’s suggestion to cut a line spoken by a White British captain per historical record is especially biting), it feels somewhat marginalized as the story unfolds through June’s narrow, self-pitying perspective and unexamined life.
