Yellowface

June Hayward is a struggling novelist watching her successful, more talented friend Athena Liu choke to death on a pancake during a night of celebratory drinking in Athena's apartment, and rather than get help fast enough to matter, June takes the only finished manuscript sitting on Athena's desk, a novel about the thousands of Chinese laborers Britain and France conscripted to dig trenches and bury the dead during the First World War. June finishes editing it, publishes it under the ambiguous byline Juniper Song, and lets reviewers and readers assume, without quite saying so herself, that she might be part Asian. The novel, retitled The Last Front, becomes a genuine bestseller, and June spends the rest of the book performing an increasingly elaborate defense of her theft to herself and everyone around her, even as an anonymous account calling itself Athena Liu's Ghost starts posting evidence of the plagiarism online. June eventually discovers the account belongs to Geoffrey Carlino, Athena's bitter ex boyfriend, and blackmails him into silence, then digs herself in deeper by lifting material a second time for a novella and accepting sympathetic coverage from conservative outlets eager to frame the backlash as a free speech story. The truth finally catches up with her through Candice Lee, a former editorial assistant June had gotten fired, who has spent months running the Athena's Ghost account for revenge and has kept Athena's actual notebooks as proof. Candice confronts June on the steps made famous by The Exorcist in Georgetown and records her confession; a scuffle over the recording device sends June to the hospital, and the recording goes public regardless. The novel ends with June already rehearsing the next version of her own story, one where she is the wronged party and Candice the villain, unconcerned with whether anyone believes it as long as enough people do.

Kuang narrates the whole book from inside June's own self justifying head, and that closeness is the joke and the discomfort at once: a reader watches June rationalize theft, plagiarism, blackmail and racial impersonation in real time and is never once let outside her logic to breathe. It reads fast, almost like a thriller, propelled by the same publishing industry appetite for a marketable identity that June is exploiting, and Kuang never lets June have a moment of real self awareness, which some readers find bracingly honest and others find exhausting well before the ending arrives.