“The night I watch Athena Liu die, we’re celebrating her TV deal with Netflix.”

From the opening sentence the reader is keenly aware of the blunt nature of the narrator. June Hayward is acerbic, aspiring, and opportunistic. She spends the rest of the book accounting for her actions that night.

Largely a book about inside the publishing world, it explores identity, jealousy, ambition, wealth, luck, privilege, writing, suffering, loneliness, deception, what I’ll call ‘woman vs woman.’ Would be a good book club read, IMO.

Two questions the book ponders:

Who gets to tell the story of a suffering group?

Who is a reliable narrator?

“The truth is fluid. There is always another way to spin the story, another wrench to throw into the narrative.” (p. 317)

Snarky, quick-paced, plotty.

4 stars.