Book Review: Yellowface by R. F. Kuang

Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars: same year at Yale, same debut year in publishing. But Athena’s a cross-genre literary darling, and June didn’t even get a paperback release. Nobody 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 to the British and French war efforts 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.

With its totally immersive first-person voice, Yellowface takes on questions of diversity, racism, and cultural appropriation not only in the publishing industry but the persistent erasure of Asian-American voices and history by Western white society. R. F. Kuang’s novel is timely, razor-sharp, and eminently readable.

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REVIEW

I didn’t plan to read this book at all, but gave in because of hype. Hype did me wrong here.

It centres around June, who is a small press mildlist writer, who has a dysfunctional relationship with Athena, a highly celebrated lead author with a big publisher. The day the story begins, they meet to celebrate Athena’s deal with Netflix, and as they head back to Athena’s place, a sequence of drunk events occur and then they decide to have a pancake eating competition. Despite June’s best efforts, Athena dies by choking on a pancake. June, who has managed to pick up Athena’s latest work-in-progress, polishes it and makes it production-ready, and passes it off to her agent as her own work, and this sets off a train wreck in slow motion.

Here, Kuang uses relatability to her advantage throughout the story. She uses June’s unique situation of turning from a relatively unknown midlister to a well-received lauded author, to showcase the two extremes of treatment that a published author might receive. Readers and authors who are familiar with the publishing process will find a lot of it well-represented, and the rest will learn quite a bit about it. Another big and relatable aspect of the story is how social media, especially Twitter, is a big part of the publishing ecosystem, and how it can make or break the perception of a book for the smallest of reasons. Anyone who has spent time interacting with the book community on the platform will be able to relive quite a few experiences when they read some chapters of the book.

Juniper is a flawed character and she wildly swings between white and black in her reasoning of why her actions may not be as reprehensible as they may seem, though she expects reason and nuance from those she interacts with online. She makes bad choice after bad choice, while thinking of not acting in that manner, and soon finds a ways to justify all of her increasingly reprehensible actions. It is clear that Kuang set out to write a frustrating character, but what didn’t work for me was the fact that the character has zero redeeming qualities, and the way her past with Athena is revealed in the narrative seems so convenient that it might have been added hastily in hindsight.

Speaking of narrative, I had a lot of issues with the structure of the book. While meant to be a snarky commentary with insights on the generic authorial experience, it meant more like a lot of author experiences were simply put on paper that it might as well have been called “Publishing Process 101”. Plenty of June’s inner monologues felt like an authorial self-insert as well. There were parts of the protagonist’s actions or her relationships with other characters that could have been explored in different parts of the book such that they would lean toward the “need to know” rather than the way they were done, which gave me the impression that the book was simply written in one pass and handed in for publication. The resolution did not completely stick either, and there were subplots that might have aided it better.

The whole book centres around a lot of publishing-centric commentary like inclusion, cultural appropriation, and diversity. The irony here is that this is a book that also points out the unfairness of how the industry has a tendency to pigeonhole people into writing about certain topics, also makes it quite evident that the author herself might have fallen victim to this. I have read all of her work so far, and while she raises some good discussions about racism in different settings, they seem to be her unending focus. I, for one, would love to see what else she write about, and how well she can do it. Maybe this wouldn’t be as much of a complaint for me as it is, if only it was explored with more nuance here. Even then, I would like to see her tackle something new.

The premise is really interesting, the book is short enough, entertaining in parts,and moves fast, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired. For me, the negatives far outweighed the very few positive aspects of this book. Craft-wise, it was an exhausting read, and I find it to be one of the rare books I would want to steer most readers away from.

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LINKS

Add YELLOWFACE on Goodreads here

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