Book Review: Yellowface, by Rebecca F. Kuang
A layered satire of writers and publishing taking well-aimed shots in all directions.
The Borough Press, 2023, 329 pages
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 novel 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. 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, 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 enjoyable.
It's said that every writer eventually writes a book about writing, usually with a thinly-veiled self-insert as a main character. Every writer who "makes it," even whose genre is usually fantasy or horror or mysteries, will at some point take on the publishing industry, their friends and colleagues and rivals, their editors and writing groups, their fans, and that one NYT reviewer who gave them a shitty review.
This is R.F. Kuang's "writers book," and I loved it. And that's without having read any of her other books (she is best known for fantasies like The Poppy War and Babel). Yellowface is a very This Year novel about the publishing industry, a satirical-but-serious story with knives out. Yes, it is about Own Voices and sensitivity readers and social media and crit groups, but it's also about insecurity, rationalization, jealousy, what it's like to be a successful writer, and what it's like to be an unsuccessful one.
I admit I was initially worried that this would be a very "woke" book. Oh, come on, you know exactly what I mean. An Asian woman author writing a book about a white woman taking credit for an Asian woman's work just screams "330 pages of ranting about white privilege and cultural appropriation and marginalization and tokenization blah blah blah."
And... there was some of that, but Kuang is nuanced enough that it mostly feels more satirical than didactic. She treats both of her writer characters - the deceased Athena Liu and the protagonist, June Hayward - with both affection and vicious skewering. It is of course a classic reader's mistake to try to project the author onto her characters, and Athena Liu and June Hayward are both obviously fictional, but I cannot help but believe Kuang put a lot of herself in both of them.
Friends since college, June Hayward (full name: "Juniper Song Hayward" - a basic white girl with a woo-woo white girl name) and Athena Liu (a posh Chinese girl with a snooty Chinese diaspora name) are both ivy league grads who always wanted to be writers. Athena immediately became a rising literary star, a hot social media darling winning awards and Netflix deals, while June managed to get one book out which disappeared into the publishing pond with an unnoticed plop.
June is seething with jealousy at Athena's success. So when they are at Athena's apartment one night and Athena suddenly (and perhaps a bit implausibly) chokes to death, June impulsively steals Athena's final manuscript.
(I know what you're thinking: so, is the big twist that June actually had something to do with Athena's death? Mild spoiler: no, she really didn't. Kuang doesn't let her become such an easy villain.)
Athena's rough draft was a book called The Last Front, telling the story of the Chinese-Canadians who served in World War I. June reads it, and it's good (of course) but still a first draft. Unpolished. It needs some work.
June's publisher is of course surprised at her unexpected new manuscript. And there is some initial trepidation: a white woman telling a story about the historical racism faced by Chinese people? But as the book goes to auction and it's clearly destined to be a bestseller, June gets all the marketing and support and hype she never got with her first feeble efforts. And (at her publisher's suggestion) publishes The Last Front under the name "Juniper Song." She never actually claims to be Chinese...
Yellowface does focus on all the expected issues, because they are brought up constantly. June has uncomfortable experiences at book tours and author panels when people find out that she is not, in fact, Chinese. Her friendship with the late Athena Liu is brought up, pointedly. And inevitably, rumors surface (fueled by a mysterious online antagonist) that she stole the manuscript for The Last Front.
Much of the book is June trying to cover her tracks and rationalize her actions. She faces harassment and persecution that she doesn't deserve (except that the reader knows she really does), and Kuang is pitch perfect in representing (and skewering) book-twitter and social media and the petty insecurities of authors and readers and reviewers. Athena Liu does not escape unscathed, as we find out (from June's admittedly unreliable point of view) that she was guilty of her own kind of theft.
But the best character is June, because Kuang makes her sympathetic, even though she is fundamentally a terrible person. Yes, stealing her friend's manuscript and rewriting it without crediting the source was bad, but it's the sort of desperation move for which she could (perhaps) be forgiven... but every opportunity June has to make things right, or at least not make things worse, her insecurity and jealousy and basic awfulness wins out, and as things spiral out of her control, you start to root for her take-down.
Does she get taken down? Does she get her well-deserved come-uppance? I won't spoil that, but honestly, the last part of the book was the least interesting to me. I guessed the climax and who was responsible, but I also felt like what nuance Kuang had given to June's character sort of flattened out as she became more and more unlikeable, and there was a bit of the boilerplate social justice ranting (delivered in a "villain" monologue, no less) that I was worried about, though it still came off as somewhat self-aware parody.
But June's arc as a Basic Karen and Colonizing White Woman was despicable and believable and sometimes pretty damn funny, and I very much enjoyed Kuang aiming her guns not just at Colonizing Karens, but also at self-righteous woke Asians, mean reviewers, the publishing industry, and the small incestuous world of frenemy fellow writers.
Yellowface is funny, poignant, mean in all the right ways, and great for anyone who likes reading writers unleash on other writers. Now I might check out one of Kuang's other award-winning books.
My complete list of book reviews.
The Borough Press, 2023, 329 pages
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 novel 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. 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, 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 enjoyable.
It's said that every writer eventually writes a book about writing, usually with a thinly-veiled self-insert as a main character. Every writer who "makes it," even whose genre is usually fantasy or horror or mysteries, will at some point take on the publishing industry, their friends and colleagues and rivals, their editors and writing groups, their fans, and that one NYT reviewer who gave them a shitty review.
This is R.F. Kuang's "writers book," and I loved it. And that's without having read any of her other books (she is best known for fantasies like The Poppy War and Babel). Yellowface is a very This Year novel about the publishing industry, a satirical-but-serious story with knives out. Yes, it is about Own Voices and sensitivity readers and social media and crit groups, but it's also about insecurity, rationalization, jealousy, what it's like to be a successful writer, and what it's like to be an unsuccessful one.
I admit I was initially worried that this would be a very "woke" book. Oh, come on, you know exactly what I mean. An Asian woman author writing a book about a white woman taking credit for an Asian woman's work just screams "330 pages of ranting about white privilege and cultural appropriation and marginalization and tokenization blah blah blah."
And... there was some of that, but Kuang is nuanced enough that it mostly feels more satirical than didactic. She treats both of her writer characters - the deceased Athena Liu and the protagonist, June Hayward - with both affection and vicious skewering. It is of course a classic reader's mistake to try to project the author onto her characters, and Athena Liu and June Hayward are both obviously fictional, but I cannot help but believe Kuang put a lot of herself in both of them.
Friends since college, June Hayward (full name: "Juniper Song Hayward" - a basic white girl with a woo-woo white girl name) and Athena Liu (a posh Chinese girl with a snooty Chinese diaspora name) are both ivy league grads who always wanted to be writers. Athena immediately became a rising literary star, a hot social media darling winning awards and Netflix deals, while June managed to get one book out which disappeared into the publishing pond with an unnoticed plop.
June is seething with jealousy at Athena's success. So when they are at Athena's apartment one night and Athena suddenly (and perhaps a bit implausibly) chokes to death, June impulsively steals Athena's final manuscript.
(I know what you're thinking: so, is the big twist that June actually had something to do with Athena's death? Mild spoiler: no, she really didn't. Kuang doesn't let her become such an easy villain.)
Athena's rough draft was a book called The Last Front, telling the story of the Chinese-Canadians who served in World War I. June reads it, and it's good (of course) but still a first draft. Unpolished. It needs some work.
June's publisher is of course surprised at her unexpected new manuscript. And there is some initial trepidation: a white woman telling a story about the historical racism faced by Chinese people? But as the book goes to auction and it's clearly destined to be a bestseller, June gets all the marketing and support and hype she never got with her first feeble efforts. And (at her publisher's suggestion) publishes The Last Front under the name "Juniper Song." She never actually claims to be Chinese...
Yellowface does focus on all the expected issues, because they are brought up constantly. June has uncomfortable experiences at book tours and author panels when people find out that she is not, in fact, Chinese. Her friendship with the late Athena Liu is brought up, pointedly. And inevitably, rumors surface (fueled by a mysterious online antagonist) that she stole the manuscript for The Last Front.
Much of the book is June trying to cover her tracks and rationalize her actions. She faces harassment and persecution that she doesn't deserve (except that the reader knows she really does), and Kuang is pitch perfect in representing (and skewering) book-twitter and social media and the petty insecurities of authors and readers and reviewers. Athena Liu does not escape unscathed, as we find out (from June's admittedly unreliable point of view) that she was guilty of her own kind of theft.
But the best character is June, because Kuang makes her sympathetic, even though she is fundamentally a terrible person. Yes, stealing her friend's manuscript and rewriting it without crediting the source was bad, but it's the sort of desperation move for which she could (perhaps) be forgiven... but every opportunity June has to make things right, or at least not make things worse, her insecurity and jealousy and basic awfulness wins out, and as things spiral out of her control, you start to root for her take-down.
Does she get taken down? Does she get her well-deserved come-uppance? I won't spoil that, but honestly, the last part of the book was the least interesting to me. I guessed the climax and who was responsible, but I also felt like what nuance Kuang had given to June's character sort of flattened out as she became more and more unlikeable, and there was a bit of the boilerplate social justice ranting (delivered in a "villain" monologue, no less) that I was worried about, though it still came off as somewhat self-aware parody.
But June's arc as a Basic Karen and Colonizing White Woman was despicable and believable and sometimes pretty damn funny, and I very much enjoyed Kuang aiming her guns not just at Colonizing Karens, but also at self-righteous woke Asians, mean reviewers, the publishing industry, and the small incestuous world of frenemy fellow writers.
Yellowface is funny, poignant, mean in all the right ways, and great for anyone who likes reading writers unleash on other writers. Now I might check out one of Kuang's other award-winning books.
My complete list of book reviews.