Yellowface by Rebecca F. Kuang
Rating: 5/5 stars!!!
Blurb
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.
My Review on Yellowface
Yellowface – The practice of wearing make-up to imitate the appearance of an East Asian person, typically as part of a performance.
June is a well-written morally grey character. My first shock from her was how she ridiculed Athena’s achievements, considering they were “friends”. Though unreliable, I really enjoyed reading this book from June’s POV because she unknowingly made her problems so clear to us.
Her low self-esteem and jealousy led her to stealing, editing, and publishing Athena’s manuscript after watching her die. From the moment she did so, I rooted deeply for June’s downfall.
This book’s theme is centered around racism, xenophobia, and plagiarism. It’s my personal belief that one should have and understand boundaries, but our main character, June, had nothing but a loud audacity.
The amount of effort she put into stealing from Athena, and misleading the public could’ve been put into her own work. When the discourse opens up on social media, she continues to act obliviously in order to save face. Unfortunately (for her), she was not let off the hook.
While reading this book, I wondered how low June was on the morality chart. I wondered how she didn’t see anything wrong with her, a white woman, plagiarising Athena, a Chinese-American woman, and then going ahead to front herself as an Asian author using her middle name, “Song”. She felt very entitled to the story she stole, not caring about its cultural impact as it was set in Asia. Although Athena herself had her own terrible personality, June’s entitlement to profit off her felt like a basic white woman exploiting that “privilege” in an industry that enables it.
As a member of book communities on social media, this book was easy to relate to as there are usually such scandals.
This book’s narrative, writing style, and theme were fantastic, as the author managed to find a balance between thought-provoking and captivating. I’ve seen reviews that have issues with the pop culture references in it, but I think most of them were important as it played a key role in June’s exposure, and it’s set in modern times.
June’s character development was something I hoped for, but there was no coming back for her. She deserved everything she got in the end.
I wholeheartedly recommend this book as it’s a really engaging page turner.