Book: Yellowface

[elusivek]

Yellowface
R.F. Kuang
Amazon Product Link

White lies. Dark humor. Deadly consequences… Bestselling sensation Juniper Song is not who she says she is, she didn’t write the book she claims she wrote, and she is most certainly not Asian American—in this chilling and hilariously cutting psychological thriller from R.F. Kuang, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Babel.

Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars in the world of literary fiction. 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.

With its totally immersive first-person voice from a masterfully crafted unreliable narrator, Yellowface grapples with questions of diversity, racism, and cultural appropriation, as well as the terrifying alienation of social media. R.F. Kuang’s novel is timely, razor-sharp, and eminently readable.

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I was a little wary about reading another RF Kuang book (more because of the lengthy descriptions of everything) but when our book club voted for this book, I hunkered down and read.

I guess you could say June as a character was well written, because I hated her lol and had a lot of eye-rolling in her self-justifying explanations and diatribe.

It seems everything in there were… cliches? (Athena the “token exotic Asian presence”, reverse racial discrimination). I was particularly annoyed when June was writing her “second” book and said that “she double dipped and took Athena’s notes too”, when in writing the “problem book” she guaranteed that’s all she took, the manuscript of the first book, and that she was shocked that she forgot about the notebooks that Athena’s mom got later. Sort of felt like… there was nothing else to write about so this extra tidbit was added to be fodder to prolong the story.

The psychological game at the end was a little tense indeed but as June said “there are ways to say something that isn’t exactly the truth but isn’t a lie either,” I guess if she wanted to, she could spin that in her favor then.