This book is a tricky one to review. The premise is GENIUS - famed young asian-americas author dies and her white failing author friend ends up with her unpublished manuscript. What will she do next‽

SPOILER WARNING.

One of my issues, though, is how unlikeable June is. I mean, from the start she is utterly boring and quite frankly mean, and so we fail to actually want to invest in her story. I had to keep putting it down and picking it up later. Truthfully, it does get better in the second half. You end up developing a relationship where - even though you despise her - you NEED to know what she will do next. Now, I'm not saying she should be made into a darling character - the whole point of the book is how she WAS fucked and racist from the start, but I wish there was more intrigue in the plot to pull us in past the whole "stealing the book". She doesn't need to be likeable, but I wish the plot had developed quicker at the beginning - I wish we had more of those snippets where it felt like she was hinting to something in the future. Kuang dotted a few in there, but I really wish she'd leant more into the idea that this was June's own novel, and we were reading her account of the events, rather than following her exact thought process - or I wish that there was more of a development of other point's of view. Truthfully though, it is a good thing that June was consistently unlikeable, because it proved the point of this book. June (and likely several white authors in the industry) will always see themselves as victims, no matter how much wrong they do. There is no need for us to paint her like a darling and then rip it away from us. She can just be a bad person. My criticism is more that June is unlikeable and really we need something else then to pull us into the story. Sure, the premise is smart, but it needs to be developed (which it was in the later parts, WHICH I LOVED.)

Another issue truly is the mention of cultural things that are VERY inclusive of now. Things like twitter, BTS, GoodReads. Though it does paint a picture of what is going on now, I do worry that the book focusses a bit too much on social media - despite not being advertised as a social media heavy book. Maybe where this could change is the marketing focussing on this point -- otherwise it got a bit same-y. 

I would like to say, though, that I really enjoyed this book. I saw other reviews criticising Kuang for letting her own voice shine through but - so what? It's her book. It's likely derived on her experiences. I couldn't careless that she did so - if anything, it made the book MORE impactful. As a whole - this book has faults. Is it a good read? Sure. But I do hope they don't market it like MYOR&R, Bunny, or other books with unlikeable MCs, because it isn't their genre, it's quite frankly one of it's own.

Kindly given to me by NetGalley to honestly review.