Athena Liu is a literary darling and June Hayward is literally nobody.
White lies…
When Athena dies in a freak accident, June steals her unpublished manuscript and publishes it as her own under the ambiguous name Juniper Song.
Dark humour…
But as evidence threatens June’s stolen success, she will discover exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.
Deadly consequences…
What happens next is entirely everyone else’s fault.
CW: Racism, racial appropriation, death
Rating
Review
It took me a long time to read this book; I hated the main character so much that I needed to take a break whenever she said stupid things. I was not sure that I would finish the book thanks to that. I finished by taking the audio version, and let me tell you, it was a good idea; otherwise, I think I would’ve DNFed it.
The main character’s viewpoint was sometimes very hard to read; she’s just a despicable person who thinks it’s her right to behave like this. She doesn’t evolve much throughout the book, even if sometimes she has an epiphany about her behaviour. Nevertheless, she doesn’t really change it. She had a mix of jealousy about Athena and a (very) big ego. I don’t know who she tried to convince for a big part of the book, but she repeatedly says that the book was nothing without her, even if it was just a draft when she stole it. The other element repeated a lot was that she thinks she is better than anyone, that her first book should have been a best-seller and that what she is living thanks to this draft, she deserves it and should have lived it with her first book. There is like a feeling of revenge coming from her toward Athena.
This book gives you a glimpse of the publishing industry, and even if we are not stupid, this is a very competitive world. I liked to see how, between writers, it’s already hard, but it’s more complicated for minority authors. You compete not only with the other author but also or even more with the other minority authors. It was also interesting to see the “fakeness” of this world, a book that the publisher determines to be a best-seller and how everything is done to make it real.
In this book, you have a level of racism that made me want to vomit from time to time. Especially when the main character made a racist comment and was like, ‘Oh, it’s nothing, I’m not in the wrong you’re as you take it the wrong way’.
This book was good, so I’m happy to have listened to it, even if sometimes it was hard and I needed a break.
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