We follow Juniper “June” Song Hayward, a struggling white author who steals, rewrites, and publishes the manuscript of Athena Liu, a recently deceased Asian author and the object of her envy. As the backlash against her grows, June digs herself a deeper and deeper hole.
This work contains examples of:
- Aborted Arc: Mrs Liu seems afraid of whatever Athena might have written in her diaries and notes and fears it getting out, implying that Athena or Mrs Liu may have a Dark and Troubled Past (or both). If she does, nothing comes of it.
- Aerith and Bob: Lampshaded by June. Athena’s full name—Athena Ling En Liu—is described as "a perfect mix of the classical and the exotic." "Athena" is an uncommon name in the Anglosphere, while the rest of her name is relatively common in China.
- Affectionate Nickname: June's friends and family sometimes call her "Junie."
- Ambiguously Bi:
- Athena is described early on as "vaguely queer," and is hit on by men and women alike, but her only known partner is male, and she never comments on her sexual orientation.
- June identifies as straight, but admits she was infatuated with Alice Cullen as a teenager. Her obsession with Athena is mostly fueled by professional jealousy, but she also briefly wonders if Athena's about to kiss her and seems willing to go with it, and when planning to write a fictionalized version of her theft of Athena's work, consciously decides to play up any sapphic undertones in their relationship for the shock value and to appeal to the BookTok audience.
- Ambiguous Ending: Was it really June’s narrative we’ve been following, or was Candice Lee simply retelling the events from her perspective? And if it was June’s narrative, was this her memoir justifying her stealing from Athena?
- Attention Whore: June is desperate to be a successful author, one that gets all sorts of media attention and has millions of adoring fans and gets movie deals. While she has plenty of money and could live off royalties from The Last Front for a decade if she's smart about it, which should give her plenty of time to come up with something good to write, she knows that if she waits too long before putting out her next book, she'll become irrelevant in the public eye. This horrifies her so much that she "double dips," stealing from Athena's notes for ideas she never actually got around to fleshing into full-fledged story concepts.
- Author Avatar: Athena has a few obvious biographical details in common with R.F. Kuang herself, being an Asian-American former Yalie who published a successful fantasy novel in her early 20s and followed up with two more books before writing a longer, "serious" novel (with the manuscript June steals arguably being analogous to Kuang's Babel). According to Kuang, Athena, a woman with a privileged background who has few problems but freely uses the traumatic experiences of others to fuel her Oscar Bait writing, represents everything she doesn't want to be as a writer.
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing:
- June presents herself as a humble, sweet-natured author who was lucky enough to hit it big after years of hard work, but her actions and narration reveal a very cruel, petty, bigoted person who looks down on nearly everyone around her.
- Athena was hailed as a darling of the literary community and had a front-facing image of a kind, sophisticated, if sometimes pretentious young woman, but she had a selfish and egotistical streak, and was prone to exploiting other people's pain for her writing, including June's sexual assault.
- The film producers June meets when discussing a possible adaptation of The Last Front are laid-back and friendly, but very casually racist.
- Black-and-Gray Morality: There are no good people in this story, save for some minor characters who are only briefly in June's orbit. Most people are selfish, the publishers are greedy and impersonal and the writers are all jealous vultures. June probably comes off the worst, since we're in her head, but she does have moments of humanity and even sympathy... up to a point. By the end, she's clearly learned nothing and become an even worse person than before, now barely going through the motions of hiding her bigotry anymore. In addition, Candice Lee exposes June as a fraud not for Athena's sake (Candice freely admits that she hated Athena) but to get revenge on June for getting her fired and acquire a massive book deal, achieving the success she's always longed for.
- But Not Too Black: June bitterly complains that Athena has benefited from being Asian, but not too Asian (Athena was American-Chinese). She also self-centredly invokes this in the creation of her persona, "Juniper Song." She claims she's not pretending to be Asian (she isn't even sure if she would be considered "Chinese" or "Korean"), but multiple people mistake her for being non-white.
- Call-Back: When a critic claims a description of "almond eyes" is proof of June's Asian fetishism, an annoyed June notes that Athena wrote that description. When Athena is posthumously dogpiled, her use of "almond eyes" in an earlier work is held up as a sign she was promoting the objectification of her own people.
- Chekhov's Gunman: Candice Lee, the editorial assistant at June's publisher whom she butts heads with early on, ends up being the one to expose her as a fraud once and for all.
- Chinese Laborer: Athena’s in-universe novel is about how Chinese workers contributed to World War I.
- Contrived Coincidence: A lot of factors have to play into June's hands to make her theft of Athena's manuscript possible. Despite being a celebrity author, Athena is extremely private about her creative process, to the extent that even her editor has no idea what she's working on until she's handed over the draft; and she totally eschews any computer programs that might leave a trail of evidence, preferring to work on a manual typewriter. Despite not being a particularly intimate friend of Athena's (lately), due to being in the right place at the right time June is the one who ends up being one of only two people who were aware of the project. The other is Athena's ex-boyfriend, whose only interest is in blackmailing June, something he's unable to do successfully as he has no hard evidence either. Finally, Athena's mother can't bring herself to read her daughter's private notebooks and has them in her possession for months before June finds out about them when she decides to donate them to a library; at this point, nobody has read them and all June has to do is convince her to reconsider her donation and pass them on to her instead.
- Creative Sterility: June is seemingly incapable of creating anything truly original. This ranges from the normal and understandable (when reading her writing from her teenage years, she notes she was clearly influenced by whatever books and movies she was into at the time, and her first novel drew heavily from her own life), to the less so (stealing Athena's work). This gets escalated when she fails to come up with an idea for a new book, and steals from Athena again to write Mother Witch, albeit far less egregiously than she did for The Last Front. Later, she finds herself wanting to steal ideas from her students, something that disgusts even her. Even her decision to write a memoir about her theft was someone else's first!
- Dead Person Impersonation: Candice uses Athena's Instagram account and posts as her to spook June.
- Digging Yourself Deeper: June steals The Last Front almost wholesale from Athena, but doesn't get caught, so she carries on plagiarizing.
- Dirty Coward: June catches her workshop students looking up info on her scandal and proceeds to brutalize one of them in class, leaving them near tears. In a surprising realistic outcome, she is reported to the woman who runs the workshop about her behavior. Rather than take responsibility for her actions or defend herself, June makes up a family emergency to justify leaving the program.
- Disappeared Dad: June and Athena's fathers are both dead; Athena's father was Driven to Suicide on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
- Disproportionate Retribution: June has her moments, such as reporting Candice, an editorial assistant, to the publisher for unprofessional behavior because Candice gave her a bad rating on Goodreads, hoping she gets fired for it. She does, which bites June squarely on the ass later, as Candice now has very good reason to hate her and get some revenge.
- Driven by Envy: June's main motivation is a desire to catch up to and surpass Athena's success, and later, the success of any other author she knows.
- Engineered Public Confession: Candice outs June as a fraud with the help of some hidden video cameras and a lot of gaslighting.
- Everyone Has Standards: Afflicted with Writer's Block after her second plagiarism scandal involving Athena, June considers an opportunity to write a novel for an IP company, but when she hears their pitch—for a The Handmaid's Tale-style dystopian novel inspired by China's one-child policy—she fiercely rejects the tone-deaf premise.
- Evil Is Petty: Oh, yes, it is! In addition to her general nastiness towards Athena, June is extraordinarily petty towards anyone she feels has slighted her, often making digs at their appearances or messing up their lives for their offenses. Her biggest Kick the Dog moment is when she's teaching a workshop to high school students, and she catches them looking her up and finding the backlash against her—and the allegations (with evidence) that she plagiarized from Athena. While leading a critique circle of one student's work, June proceeds to tear the poor girl to smithereens, despite inwardly admitting that her writing is very good for her age. Rather than actually do her job and help her fix her weak points, June goes full Sadist Teacher, humiliating her in front of the class and mocking her mistakes—which themselves are mistakes any new writer is bound to make—and relishing in driving her to near-tears. Again, this student is seventeen years old.
- Fatal Flaw: June cannot leave well enough alone. Against all advice, she keeps pursuing the controversy surrounding The Last Front. She cannot stop reading what people say about her and feeding the beast when the smarter thing to do would be just to ignore it and let it go away on its own. She notes many times throughout the book that she made enough off the plagiarized book to pay for law school and would never need to worry about anything again. Her obsession with this even years after the fact is what gets her exposed for good.
- Fate Worse than Death: June loves writing and the literary world so much that she considers any fate, no matter how awful, to be better than not being able to write and share her work anymore.
- Fictional Document: Many, since this is a story about publishing.
- Athena's written three novels, Voice and Echo being her debut, and several short stories.
- June has one novel out at the start of the book, Over the Sycamore.
- The Last Front begins as a first draft to a war novel Athena's written, and it is then stolen, finished, and published by June.
- Later, June steals a few lines and some inspiration from Athena's notes and writes Mother Witch, a novella.
- Candice sells a memoir called Yellowface on proposal about the whole scandal and how she exposed June. June decides to write one of her own.
- Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: The narrative makes it clear that Athena using the story of June's sexual assault for her writing without her permission was extremely fucked-up and selfish, and that Athena probably did have a habit of this throughout her life. However, it also makes it clear that this in no way justifies June's own actions, especially since June's theft of The Last Front leads to many innocent people getting hurt in the crossfire. June was indeed horribly betrayed by Athena, but that doesn't give her the right to exploit a marginalized community and abuse her position of privilege to punish anyone who dares criticize or question her. Ultimately, two wrongs don't make a right.
- Gaslighting: Candice's plan to get June to reveal her crimes, since she knows June will never come clean on her own. With a friend's help, she gains access of Athena's old Instagram account, and photoshops several images of Athena, showing her alive and well long after her death. She blocks everyone except June on the account, so only June will see them. Later, when confronting June in the dark, she plays old clips of Athena to make it seem like Athena is there speaking to her. It works better than she ever could've hoped, especially since June's Sanity Slippage was already causing her to see Athena's "ghost."
- Green-Eyed Monster: June is screamingly jealous of Athena and her success, which even she admits is a very ugly quality. Said envy extends to any author who is doing better than her (or, later, could potentially eclipse her own success), but Athena is the most frequent target, probably because they know each other personally.
- Here We Go Again!: The story ends with June about to be exposed by Candice's tell-all memoir... and deciding to write a memoir of her own, painting herself as the hero. And because of the nature of the industry, June knows it will sell, and she'll once again get control of the narrative.
- Hippie Name: Juniper Song, for the decidedly un-hippieish protagonist.
- Hippie Parents: June's explanation for why her full name is Juniper Song Hayward; her mom had a hippie phase.
- Homoerotic Subtext: In-Universe: when June contemplates writing a novel lightly fictionalizing the real story of her plagiarism in order to invoke Refuge in Audacity, she decides to deliberately play this up between the characters representing her and Athena, hoping it will appeal to the "BookTok" crowd.
- Hurricane of Excuses: June justifies her theft of Athena's manuscript to herself, and to the reader, in a wide variety of often-contradictory ways: she feared that it would never be published, or would only be published as a curiosity, if it were known to be Athena's unfinished work, so that she is doing right by Athena by putting it into the world by any means necessary; Athena is dead, and June owes her nothing; June is no less of a thief than Athena herself, since Athena constantly appropriated the distressing experiences of others in her writing; June improved upon Athena's writing to the extent that The Last Front is essentially her work and is most accurately published under her name, etc.
- Hype Backlash: Discussed and present In-Universe. As Brett points out, any novel that gets popular will attract haters and people who don't see what the big deal is. Athena's work is critically acclaimed and extremely popular, but there's also a not-insignificant number of people who consider it to be overhyped and pretentious, and sometimes outright offensive. The Last Front is a smash hit, with lots of marketing and glowing reviews, but it also quickly garners an intense hatedom.
- I Just Want to Be You: June sincerely loves writing and has wanted to be an author since she was a child, but she also desperately wants Athena's life and career; adored, wealthy, critically acclaimed, and having people hanging on her every word. This motivates much of her actions after Athena dies.
- I Wished You Were Dead: Early on, June admits that when her envy got particularly potent, some part of her wished Athena was dead.
- Ignorant of Their Own Ignorance: June calls the names Athena gave her characters "confusing", and despite claiming to do lots of research, she is seemingly unaware of such basic concepts as nicknames or different families having the same common surname (no, June, that's not an incestuous couple, that family name is just really popular). So she renames most of the characters, and then is offended when reviewers make fun of the book for stealing names from famous CDramas.
- Ignored Epiphany: Every now and again, June has a crisis of conscience and seems to realize the full gravity of her actions and how horrible they are. Then, without fail, she talks herself around into believing she's actually the hero, the victim, and what she's done is fine.
- Insufferable Genius: The only thing June finds more aggravating than Athena's success and acclaim is Athena's faux-humble attitude about it... and the fact that she really is that good.
- It's All About Me:
- When Athena learns about June being raped, she’s there to support her…and then proceeds to publish a story clearly taken from June’s experience. Despite how unlikable June is, it’s hard to not sympathize with her after learning about this.
- June herself is unbelievably self-centered, and will do whatever mental backflips required to make herself the victim in every situation.
- Ivy League for Everyone: Athena and June met at Yale, where both were undergraduates. Athena has, in the time since, gone on to other prestigious schools.
- Karma Houdini: After June tells her about being sexually assaulted, Athena uses her traumatic experience to write a near-identical story. It’s one of the reasons why June doesn’t think she’s in the wrong for stealing her manuscript.
- Karma Houdini Warranty: After pulling off the perfect crime and completely burying all suspicions and evidence of plagiarism, June finally digs her own grave when she steals a few sentences from Athena's notes and spins another book off them, unaware that Athena had previously shared them with a writing workshop.
- The Last Title: In-Universe with The Last Front, Athena's manuscript as revised and completed by June.
- Loophole Abuse: Technically, June never says she's Asian while promoting The Last Front. "Juniper Song" really is her full first and middle name, and she never denies she's white when asked. But she knows full well the conclusions people will draw based on her name ("Song" being a common Chinese surname), and deliberately chooses author photos where she looks vaguely tan rather than paper-white.
- Manipulative Bitch: June manipulates Athena's grieving mother to prevent Athena's notebooks (which included notes for The Last Front) from being donated to Yale, playing on Mrs. Liu's emotional distance from her daughter and desire to do right by her. In a spectacularly tasteless and cruel move, she claims that putting Athena's private notes in a public library would be like putting her corpse on display. It works.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Much of the novel's second half deals with the possibility that Athena is either alive or haunting June as a ghost. While most of the events pointing to such a thing have a rational explanation, June's sighting of Athena at the first reading on her book tour is never explained.
- Meaningful Rename: While working on marketing, June’s publishers rebrand her as “Juniper Song”—an ambiguously Asian name.
- Most Writers Are Writers: June and Athena are both writers. A lot of the supporting characters are writers, too.
- The Muse: Much to June's eventual horror, Athena is essentially this to her. While working on The Last Front, she feels like Athena's talent has been passed to her and feels like their voices are working in tandem, and afterwards, she finds she can't write without trying to tap into Athena's mind and voice.
- Muse Abuse:
- Athena frequently drew from the personal (and often traumatic) experiences of others for her writing, such as visiting a museum exhibit about the horrors of a POW camp and speaking to a survivor for material, and retelling the story of June's sexual assault for a short story in college. Her ex-boyfriend Jeff claims that she also used parts of their arguments word-for-word in her writing.
- June interestingly pulls this off when the muse is dead. Her entire career is built off the stolen work of Athena, tarnishing her name and legacy after she's gone.
- Never My Fault: Even as June receives boatloads of backlash from Asian readers, she never owns any up to her wrongs, and she and her white acquaintances continue to dismiss their concerns as “petty” and “mean.”
- No Such Thing as Bad Publicity: In-Universe, all the controversy regarding The Last Front and its portrayal of Chinese people, and later questions of its authorship, keep the book in the spotlight and sell a lot of copies. By the end, June is leaning into this mindsight, embracing her status as a literary pariah and known thief to sell a memoir, fuelled by controversy and Refuge in Audacity.
- Not in This for Your Revolution: Candice Lee is the one who exposes June in the end, but she fully admits she isn't in it to save Athena Liu's work and legacy from a thief — actually, she hated Athena just as much as June did. But given how awful June was to her, getting her fired, and how few opportunities she's been given in the publishing world, Candice fully intends to expose June in order to ruin her life, and get a major book deal out of it, too.
- Offending the Creator's Own: In-Universe:
- Athena is proudly Chinese-American and draws from Chinese culture and history for her works, but some prominent Asian critics consider her work to be rooted in stereotypes to pander to a white audience, and one even calls her Orientalist.
- It's also clear that a lot of Asian writers and critics are exasperated with Athena Liu being treated as the Chinese-American author, as if there's only room for one at a time. Candace explicitly says that she fucking hates Athena Liu.
- Only Friend: Despite Athena's massive popularity as a writer and internet personality, by the end of her life, June was pretty much this to her, despite the fact that June privately resented her and didn't really think of her as a friend at all. It's unclear whether this is because Athena's strict work ethic doesn't allow her to maintain many friendships, or whether, as June suspects, the rest of the literary community also finds her success and her corresponding self-importance unbearable.
- Outliving One's Offspring: Athena is survived by her mother.
- Overshadowed by Controversy: In-Universe, it's clear that by the end, all anyone will remember The Last Front, and by extension June's entire career, for is the fact that it was largely plagiarized.
- Plagiarism in Fiction: The entire premise explores this in the context of a struggling white author taking credit for the work of a popular Asian-American author after the latter's sudden death.
- Plot-Triggering Death: Athena's death at the beginning.
- Politically Incorrect Villain: June clearly has a lot of racist tendencies, especially towards Asians. However, because she's not a slurs-screaming alt-right nutjob, a lot of people don't notice, and she herself is deeply in denial over it.
- Redemption Rejection: June has multiple chances to back out of her lie before it gets out of hand, and even more to come clean and at least try and make things right after the fact. She rejects them all.
- Refuge in Audacity:
- When June is exposed as a thief, she decides to write a fictionalized pseudo-memoir about the theft and publication of The Last Front, effectively confessing without actually confessing, to redeem herself in the public eye and sell a shitload of books in one fell swoop. She deliberately plays up the most lurid of details, knowing this will shock and intrigue the public, and while there will inevitably be blowback, she figures people will kind of appreciate the not-quite-honesty, and getting as close to the truth as she'll ever provide.
- In the end, she actually goes even further, deciding to write a memoir where she portrays herself as a hero who saved Athena's last work from obscurity, while also smearing both Athena and Candice Lee's names. Once again, she knows people will hate her for it, but they'll also buy the book just to hear the drama... and once someone is willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, the tides will turn, and everyone involved will be dragged through the mud, and no one will win. As long as she stays in the spotlight and makes a lot of money, she's fine with that.
- Sanity Slippage: A combination of guilt, stress, hubris, and trauma catch up to June, and cause her to start seeing Athena's ghost, and her narration becomes a touch... unhinged in the last third or so.
- Shout-Out: To Kuang’s previous book, Babel, or the Necessity of Violence.“And they don’t get that film is a totally different medium, and requires different storytelling skills,” says Justin. “It’s a translation, really. And translation across mediums is inherently unfaithful to some extent. Roland Barthes. An act of translation is an act of betrayal.”
- Spiteful Suicide: After she's finally exposed, June contemplates suicide. This is partially because of her career being destroyed and being genuinely depressed over it, but she is partially tempted by the idea of the fact that it would definitely make her critics feel terrible. She doesn't go through with it, however.
- Stealing the Credit: June steals The Last Front, though it's a lot more work than it initially sounds like, since Athena only had a first draft done — June actually does write, edit, and rewrite large chunks of the novel. This eases her shrunken conscience a bit, since she did work on the manuscript a lot. When she's exposed, everyone assumes she stole the whole thing from Athena, which infuriates her, but there's no way to prove who wrote what, not that she's willing to confess, anyway.
- Undignified Death: Athena invites June to her apartment for drinks, and then decides they should make pancakes with pandan extract. While they are eating the pancakes, Athena chokes on one. June calls 911 and attempts the Heimlich maneuver but it is no use.
- Unreliable Narrator: June. In addition to her increasingly-thin denials of her racism and cruelty, it also becomes apparent that she's not 100% right in the head.
- Villain Protagonist: June is a horrible person; petty, cruel, jealous, scheming, racist and completely unable to take the blame for her own horrid actions. She begins the story by stealing the work of her dead friend, and ends it very willing to commit murder—though fortunately she doesn't get the chance.
- Vitriolic Best Buds: On their best days, Athena and June were this, as despite all the envy, competition, and outright hatred, June admits there were times they had a lot of fun together. Deconstructed, as the toxicity in their relationship and both of their selfish and hurtful actions ultimately outweighed whatever affection was there.
- Vocal Minority: Discussed In-Universe. Overall, the percentage of readers who engage with book Twitter and the literary world on social media is quite small, but those that do are by far the most vocal. So even when June is receiving the most backlash of her career, she and her agent both know that the vast majority of readers have probably never even heard of the controversy, and are continuing to buy and read The Last Front, same as ever. However, social media and especially Twitter is vital for marketing and networking in the modern publishing world, and June is an Attention Whore, so simply logging off isn't an option for her.
- We Used to Be Friends: Although June initially characterizes her friendship with Athena as purely one of convenience since they both moved to the same area after being casually acquainted during college, it turns out they really were very close in freshman year, until they drifted apart and June discovered that Athena had used the confidential details of her sexual assault in a short story. If Athena has any idea that she and June aren't still cool, she hasn't let on.
- Wham Line: "I must confess, I double-dipped." Turns out June's plagiarism didn't stop with The Last Front, and this new project ultimately leads to her downfall.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: The book ends mere weeks after Candice finally exposes June as a fraud, so we never find out if Athena's mother decides to sue her.
- With Friends Like These...: June is deeply resentful of Athena's success, and is prone to very mean-spirited and petty thoughts of jealousy. On the flipside, Athena once wrote and published a story based on June's sexual assault, which June told her in confidence.
- Writers Suck: Authors and the publishing industry as a whole do not come off looking great.
- You Didn't Ask: Since June never claims to be Chinese, she says it's on other people for making assumptions, despite the fact that she knows full well that her publisher rebrands her "Juniper Song" specifically to make people think she's Asian. The way June sees it, anyone who automatically assumes someone with the last name "Song" is Asian is, in fact, the real racist. This excuse does not go over well in the literary community.
