Yellowface Book Review

From Goodreads: 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.

Warning: This review contains spoilers.

Initially, I was really drawn to this book. I’ve loved R.F. Kuang’s writing for a while now, and she always has a way of guiding the reader through complex themes with a particular nuance and panache. The prose usually sings on the page, and the characters are all deep and well-developed. So, perhaps unsurprisingly, I’ve had my eye on Yellowface for quite some time.

The plot sounded very intriguing. It’s about a woman whose writing career isn’t living up to what she hoped it would be. She’s fuelled by jealousy of her successful friend, and she ends up doing the unthinkable, taking her book and making it her own. It’s brilliant because it feeds into so many discussions about the publishing industry right now, especially as it is becoming harder and harder to get published and then keep a career going, especially if you’re talking about writing for a living without some other employment involved. The start of the book is great for this, and I think Kuang does a fantastic job of making sure that the frenemies jealousy that June feels for Athena is layered and complicated. I particularly like that, over the course of the book, there’s a real attempt to peel back some of the alluring intrigue of Athena, especially as she’s painted in such a romantic light at the start of the story. She’s an author who is living the dream, and when she’s not out traipsing through museums, she’s sipping expensive whisky in her apartment and writing out her novels in Moleskin notebooks and on typewriters. She gives off a bit of a Donna Tartt vibe in all honesty, but rehashed and updated for a more contemporary audience. And so, it feels necessary that, over the course of the story, we don’t just see Athena in this light. The tense friendship between June and Athena rings true as well, as we see a complicated mixture of genuine affection, jealousy, resentment, and honestly just fear… Athena may be a mystery and a celebrity, but she comes across as being very isolated and it’s never entirely made clear if this is because she’s so successful, or if she’s just more of a lone wolf. Either way, I quite like that we never know for certain. Later, there’s more of a debate about whether Athena herself has any right to write about the subjects she gravitates towards, since she’s, to some extent, privileged by her financial status, but this is something that is only briefly touched upon.

So yeah, the book starts strong, with the friendship and the intrigue and the horror over what June is doing. Kuang doesn’t make it a simple act of plagiarism, which again, I’m grateful for. Rather, June takes a rough draft of Athena’s magnum opus and rewrites and adds to it until she feels as though it is her own work. It opens up some interesting doors to discussions about inspiration and what belongs to who, an idea which is circled back to several times throughout Yellowface. 

Of course, this is further complicated by Athena’s subject matter. Athena’s book is all about Chinese soldiers in World War I, and June is white. Initially, she intends to just own this, but her publisher is reluctant to deal with potential backlash. And so, over time, she starts to deceive her audience. She changes her pen name to “Juniper Song”, (Song is her middle name, but it is done to “sound more Asian”) and she uses an author photo where the lighting makes her ethnicity more ambiguous. There are some really uncomfortable scenes which emerge from this, such as when June is acting as a mentor for an Asian-American author called Emmy, or when she goes to a book group meeting and everyone there assumes she is Chinese-American. It’s very reminiscent of the American Dirt debate which emerged a few years ago, about who has the right to tell certain stories, and who does not. The debate is frequently presented at author panels, where June can’t hide her whiteness quite so well, and on social media, where the whole thing turns into a whirlwind of cancel culture and trolling that definitely feels like a nod to the current state of Twitter.

That being said, this is where the book fell a little flat for me. Again, I really liked this idea, but it never fully develops. I’m a bit reluctant to be critical about this, because Yellowface raises an excellent point about pigeon-holing in the publishing industry and how minority authors are often forced to comb the same genres and themes over and over again. I can understand, given that Kuang has a series and a standalone which do an incredibly heavy dive into racism and colonialism, she might want a more lighthearted project. I will say that there were some great discussions in here, especially about how minority authors are shoved into these boxes and how it affects them and their work. But. But. But ultimately there’s a sticking point in the story which I think makes these themes too shallow, and that is the protagonist.

June ultimately doesn’t feel like a real person. She expresses her imposter syndrome and fears in her career well-enough, and this adds some semblance of character to her, but she lacks any real personality. We don’t really learn much about June, and over the course of the book she is more and more consumed with taking Athena Liu’s place and justifying her own actions. This could be intentional, a sort of deliberate erasure of the character as a symbol of how minority authors are projected upon in the publishing industry. Her rationale is always the same: she feels a bit of guilt, sure, but she also believes the book genuinely belongs to her, and she isn’t really doing that much wrong. She argues that it is other peoples’ faults for assuming her ethnicity based on her new name. And while this is horrifying, to be sure, it never really moves beyond that, June’s inability to recognise that she doesn’t have the right to this story, not only because it was originally someone else’s draft but because it is about an experience she couldn’t possibly know about. I don’t know how to put it into words exactly, but the discussion feels a bit shallow, especially in comparison to Kuang’s other novels. June is very much a caricature of white ignorance and racism: not only does she tell Emmy that she believes “Chinese writers are very fashionable right now” during their first meeting, she suggests that white people have a harder time getting published because she thinks BIPOC people get a leg up, which is ironic given that she’s in the middle of mentorship scheme for BIPOC writers. She also frequently tweets about BTS and bubble tea in the hopes of appearing more ambiguous.  And while I think this is a fair criticism of how white people can behave, and especially a problematic tendency to lump everything “Asian” into one neat word and culture, it also just doesn’t seem to go anywhere. People keep telling June her behaviour is awful, she feels bad for a second, and then she goes ahead and does something even worse and tries to justify it by deciding it is her right since she believes, for some unfathomable reason, that she’s either not being all that awful. She believes she isn’t privileged, and again this is interesting, but she comes across as a huge Karen and never really develops from there.

And honestly, in struggling to put all of this into words for a review, I still can’t decide if this is a stroke of genius on the author’s part, because June’s heavy-handed caricature behaviour is so similar to how BIPOC characters are often written in literature by white authors, but I’m still not certain. I’m questioning whether all of this is intentional and very cleverly done, or if it’s simply that the characters and the themes were a a bit under-baked.

There is a bit, right at the very end of the book, where I thought we were about to get more of a conversation about this. There’s a moment where June reads a post asking if what she did was really plagiarism, or if it was more of an act of co-creation. She’s happy that someone sympathises and recognises what she’s done, and how much of her own work that she’s poured into this book. It’s a fleeting pause in the narrative, and this thread isn’t plucked at again, but it sat with me for a while after I finished the book. Because June’s belief that she co-wrote the book, and is therefore entitled to at least some of the praise and recognition, is apparent. But what she’s not really willing to acknowledge, even towards the end of the narrative when she’s determined to keep herself relevant, is that the story didn’t really belong to her.

Overall, I’m giving Yellowface:

 

 

 

 

 

I think it’s a really interesting book, and it’s definitely a page-turner. I honestly couldn’t put it down. But when I compare it to some of R.F. Kuang’s other novels, I can’t help but feel as though it’s lacking some complexity that I’ve come to love in her writing. As I said, I can’t tell if I’m missing some of the nuance in this novel, and so I feel like it’s a book I’m going to have to circle back to at some point, but I know I’m not the only person who has done a bit of head-scratching over this one.

Has anyone else read this book or plans to? What do you think about it? Let me know by joining in the discussion in the comments section down below! <3