I recently finished reading Yellowface by Rebecca F. Kuang after many, many months of a nasty reading slump coupled with procrastination. I ended up tearing through this book in two days and I have quite a lot of thoughts now.
Let’s dive in.
Goodreads synopsis
Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. But Athena’s a literary darling. June Hayward is literally nobody. Who wants stories about basic white girls, June thinks.
So when June witnesses Athena’s death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse: she steals Athena’s just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers during World War I.
So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? Doesn’t this piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller? That’s what June claims, and the New York Times bestseller list seems to agree.
But June can’t get away from Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens to bring June’s (stolen) success down around her. As June races to protect her secret, she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.
My review
Yellowface is about June Hayward, a white author who’s inexplicably friends with literary darling Athena Liu. There’s only one problem — she’s jealous of her success and wants it for herself.
“I feel this hot coiling in my stomach, a bizarre urge to stick my fingers in her berry-red-painted mouth and rip her face apart, to neatly peel her skin off her body like an orange and zip it up over myself.”
When she witnesses Athena’s death, she steals her manuscript, makes a few edits, and passes it off as her own. She even rebrands to publish under the racially ambiguous name Juniper Song. She convinces herself that she’s not exactly guilty, that she deserves this, and that’s where the audacity of the caucasity starts.
What RFK has done really well is expose June’s racism and microagressions, especially while writing in first person. June is surprised by Mrs. Liu’s good vocabulary skills, she constantly looks down on Chinese food, speaks loudly and slowly to an old Asian man assuming he wouldn’t know English — the basic racist starter pack.
Yellowface cleverly explores themes like cultural appropriation, biases in publishing, and the viciousness of social media. I found June as a narrator distasteful yet entertaining through the book, making her unabashed sense of white entitlement similar to a train crash I wanted to follow to the last page.
It’s the narration itself where my problems with Yellowface also lie. Our supposed unreliable narrator is too obvious. She doesn’t withhold information or twist events as such narrators often do — she promptly explains every single action, writing justifications right away.
Yellowface also suffers from underdeveloped ideas. June weakly talks about how Athena did Bad Things too, but the nuances are never explored deeply enough and Athena is dead for us to see for ourselves if there was anything more to her character.
Overall, it was the lack of complexity that didn’t make this the five star read that I thought it would be. It’s blunt, lacks intrigue, and often sacrifices deeper explorations of the complex themes it tries to touch upon by prioritizing bluntness instead.
Yellowface is a fast-paced and entertaining read, nonetheless. You’ll find it engaging if you’re okay with it being a straightforward literary satire. But if you, like me, crave complex characters and nuanced themes from novels with unreliable narrators, you might be left wanting.
My rating: 3.5 out of 5
Let’s chat
- Have you read Yellowface? What did you think?
- Would you pick this book up if you haven’t already?
- Have you ever been a part of/at the receiving end of a pile on on social media? I know I have (oops).
Talk to me in the comments!