Most of what this was doing is undermined within its own text or doesn’t come together at the plot level to be engaging. The post modern aspects especially don’t make sense by the end, when it’s revealed what it is we are ostensibly reading. Some of this could be hand waved away by the unreliable narrator of the fictional author and the fact that, by most measures, she seems to be generally a bad reader. And maybe that’s supposed to armour aspects of the book that don’t make sense, since, if this is a “counter narrative”, or a response to something else, it really doesn’t make sense that she would include these just for dramatic effect. But worst of all, the things included still don’t rescue it from being incredibly boring, because June herself, is not an interesting character, even with the meta connotations applied to her.

She’s a white woman who has stolen her friend’s manuscript after her death. Languishing in writer purgatory with a mediocre, forgotten book, she appropriates the text written by a person of colour, making absolutely condemnable and cringeworthy edits to the text to make it yet more palatable to her. When it becomes a success, she justifies her theft as work product inspired by the original manuscript. More of a satirical slice-of-life, rather than an actual plot though, we basically just follow a series of interactions that you’d expect from the reception of the novel, and her subsequent attempts at trying to be a “success” story, despite her guilt haunting her (up to a point).

Because all of the meta context around cancel culture and own voices are wholesale lifted from actual events in publishing, I don’t think this actually engages the reader to think about these topics. It tries to do some both sides, since June is narrating her story and showing her motivated thinking, but because June is unable to engage meaningfully with her critics or with her own abilities, the reader either understands the meta context already, or won’t be on-boarded regardless. It raises a number of interesting topics, but again, can’t actually interact with them through the perspective it’s chosen. And when it does try to, it doesn’t make sense because it calls into question why June would do so. Rather than becoming more interactive for the reader, it only becomes more difficult to suspend disbelief. So, it alternates between serious and satirical in the hopes that it shouldn’t matter.

If the text itself is a joke, and it’s meant to be bad, the fact that it was a massive slog and featured the ultimate boring character, doesn’t do it justice. The closest it comes to being interesting is the idea of authors colonizing their own lives for material, but because the core of that idea was turned toward sexual assault, during one alternating attempt to make June more sympathetic, but we know with the context of the ending, this becomes undermined, it once again becomes an interesting theme that falls by the wayside, just like most everything else fleetingly mentioned as a throwback to Twitter discourse.