Rebecca F. Kuang is a Marshall Scholar, translator, and the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Award-nominated author of the Poppy War trilogy and the #1 New York Times bestselling Babel. She has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford; she is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale. You can find her online at rfkuang.com. You can find more of my reviews of Kuang's work here.
Authors Jane 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, and 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 readable.
Kuang pulls no punches about the publishing industry, and that's one of the most satisfying parts of reading this book. Everything we suspected about the industry—the racism, xenophobia, sexism, and more—is printed within the pages of Yellowface. While industry processes aren't explicitly stated (nowhere is it shown how advances and royalty rates are specifically calculated), the entire publishing process from acquisition to production to publicity to release is shown through June's and Athena's experiences, and it's enough to demonstrate much of what is flawed and just wrong with publishing. Kuang shedding necessary light on this might surprise a lot of people, but to those familiar with the industry, it feels like a validation for what we're seeing that's wrong. To me, it also felt like an opportunity to start thinking about solutions and then acting on ways to make the industry better.
One of the pleasant surprises of this book was the role of social media, and not because it was a good depiction. Kuang articulates in sometimes horrifying detail how social media plays a role in the book world—and I do mean horrifying, because there is a lot of damage done on these platforms. While there is no sympathy for June regarding what she did, the sheer amount of hate messages she got was sickening, and it's enough to really make you think about the power and role of social media in our society, and in publishing. Is it necessary to be active, all the time? What role do DMs from strangers play in how we define our self worth? Kuang really puts a lot of emphasis on social media, to the point where the book feels like an examination of social media just as much as it is an examination of the publishing industry.
The novel is a satire, and I found most of the humor to come from how absurd June's narration is. She is the definition of an unreliable narrator, and you really know it from page one. In all honesty, it's more chilling than hilarious how close to the truth Yellowface cuts, so if you're looking for a laugh-out-loud satire, you probably won't find that here. Instead, Yellowface's humor comes from the absurdity of June's narration, and the book itself is really a chilling, dark-humor look at the publishing industry and about white privilege in general. It's quite unlike anything I'd ever read before, and I would definitely highly recommend it to people who actively engage in the book community and are thinking about or are in publishing.
After reading Yellowface I think I'm going to have to go back and read Kuang's The Poppy War series because I'm now hooked and will read everything she writes. You can find more of my reviews of Kuang's work here.
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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