June Hayward, a young writer, aspires to break into the publishing world and write for a living. After her first novel flopped and her publisher lost interest in her work, she was forced to resort to tutoring and living paycheck-to-paycheck in order to support herself. Her frustration becomes amplified by the fact that her close friend from college, Athena Liu, has faced nothing but success and fame after selling her first novel. Athena, unlike June, has published several novels and won numerous awards, fellowships, and contracts. June believes that part of the reason she can’t gain the attention that Athena has is her race; June is white, while Athena is Chinese-American and writes about Chinese culture, history, and identity.
One night, while the two women are celebrating a Netflix deal that Athena just signed, June witnesses Athena accidentally choke to death. Despite the traumatic event, June manages to take an unfinished manuscript from Athena’s apartment that very night. She realizes that this manuscript could be her ticket to success; she finishes it and presents it to her agent as the novel The Last Front. They publish the book, “smoothing” over some of the white characters in order to make them more sympathetic and with June rebranding herself as “Juniper Song,” taking on her middle name as her last name in order to impart a sense of racial ambiguity to her identity. The book is an immediate hit.
However, June’s success is only stable for a short period—as the book grows in popularity, June must face a series of attacks that identify her as a white woman and accuse her of cultural appropriation, as well as various rumors that threaten to unveil the fact that June plagiarized the manuscript. As she struggles to keep her story straight, pressure mounts from her publisher for June to produce more work. She manages to write another novel based on a draft of a short story she stole from Athena’s apartment—but when the novel is published, she is hit with another round of plagiarism accusations, even more damning than the last. Along the way, June continuously struggles with her own feelings of guilt and debates whether her plagiarism was somehow justified, especially given Athena's own potential "exploitation" of racial trauma and stories that weren't her "own"—stories she "took" from the people around her or from immigrants outside of her own family.
Athena’s old Instagram account also begins harassing June, which drives June—already fragile from the level of internet hate she receives—to the brink of insanity. June demands to meet the owner of the account, who reveals herself to be Candice Lee: a young editorial assistant who June had gotten fired from her position at Eden Press, the publisher she worked with to release The Last Front. Candice and June have a physical confrontation, with Candice recording June confessing to plagiarism, and Candice pushes June off of a set of stairs. As June recovers in the hospital, she vows to write another book telling the whole truth about the publishing industry and its perverse exploitation of identity politics.
