Having recently read Babel, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on this new book by R. F. Kuang.
It’s so good!
As with Babel, I listened to this one on audio. Different narrator, but just as good. I loved it.
The story is told in first person from the perspective of a white woman named Juniper Song Hayward. She’s a struggling author who published one book that didn’t do well and she hasn’t managed to sell another book since then. She’s making ends meet by teaching and it doesn’t help that her college friend, Athena Liu, is a super successful author who never has to worry about money and is currently celebrating selling the rights to one of her books to Netflix.
June doesn’t really like Athena. She’s intensely jealous of her success and feels like Athena is constantly flaunting it in her face. That’s not Athena’s intention, but her lack of awareness of June’s reality doesn’t do much to endear June to her.
But Athena doesn’t seem to have any other friends, so June finds herself celebrating Athena’s success with her. The two of them are alone in Athena’s apartment eating celebratory pancakes when Athena chokes to death on one of the pancakes. June tries to help, but can’t remember how to do the Heimlich maneuver. She calls 911, but of course they can’t get there in time.
June is genuinely traumatized by the event, but apparently not traumatized enough to not steal the rough draft of Athena’s latest manuscript. It’s really good, but it’s still a rough draft. June finds herself polishing it, and before she knows it, she has a manuscript worthy of sending to her agent.
Fortunately for June, Athena was intensely private about what she was working on so no one knows the manuscript was stolen. June even manages to convince herself she has every right to the book because of the work she put into polishing it. As obvious as it is that it’s a B.S. excuse, it is a truth universally acknowledged among writers that writing the rough draft is the fun part. Editing is where the real work comes in.
The publishers are enamored of the manuscript and offer June an advance that’s probably more money than she’s ever seen in her life. They also put a lot more effort into promoting the book than her first publisher ever put into promoting her first book, a not-so-subtle commentary on how deeply weird the publishing industry is. Yes, talent plays a role. So does the subject you choose to write about, the genre, your persistence, and of course, your connections. Even so, which books the publishing industry will choose to promote as their newest darling seems to be more of a crapshoot than anything else.
There’s just one hurdle the publisher has to address: the book is about Chinese laborers during WWI and June is a white author. They decide that, instead of publishing under the name June Hayward, the name attached to her first unsuccessful book, they’ll publish it under her full first name and use her middle name as her last name Juniper Song. The official story is that it’s a rebranding of her authorship to signal a new phase in her writing career, but of course they do it because Juniper Song sounds like a Chinese name, when really it’s just the name a white hippy woman gave to her white daughter.
June feels absolutely no qualms about this, and for some reason resists when one of the editors suggests a sensitivity reading. June insists she’s confident she doesn’t need it, but if she was really so confident, why would she feel threatened by a sensitivity read? Wouldn’t it just prove how on point her writing is?
It’s not until the book is published that June really has to deal with people challenging her on her status as a white woman writing about Chinese laborers. She comes up with the usual excuses we all hear from real-life cultural appropriators: “I don’t think writers should be limited in what they can write about just because of the color of their skin, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”
The book covers the social media landscape pretty well. There are always the people who will call out white writers for cultural appropriation, followers of theirs who try to cancel said white writers, white supremacists supporting the white writer because they’re white supremacists who probably haven’t read a whole book in their lives, etc.
Actually, my favorite part was when a bunch of conservatives started buying June’s book because of the accusations of cultural appropriation around the book. First, it was funny to acknowledge that a publisher doesn’t really care if their top-selling author does something despicable as long as they keep making money (after all, they are a business and their end goal is to make money, whatever they say to the contrary.)
I also thought about how those ultra conservatives are probably the people who most need to read a book about Chinese laborers in WWI. If June making one of the white characters into a sort of white savior makes the story more palatable to them, so much the better. They’re still learning about something they would never otherwise learn about.
That said, it’s more likely they just bought the book to piss off liberals and never actually bothered to read it.
I won’t go into details about what happens next because a lot of what makes the book so much fun to read is the way it keeps you guessing about whether June is going to get away with stealing her friend’s work. I will say the book did a great job of keeping you guessing right up to (and even beyond?) the very end. It’s full of ups and downs and twists and turns. Every few chapters you think June is going to get away with it after all and everything seems to be going well for her. Then you realize you’re only halfway through the book, so of course something has to go wrong.
All in all, I thought this was a great book about cultural appropriation and how deeply weird the publishing industry is, not to mention the idiosyncrasies of the internet and how people tend to entrench themselves in their opinions without bothering to learn the full story. Cannot recommend this one highly enough, especially if you enjoyed The Other Black Girl.