I have had Yellowface on my TBR list for over a year, but never really found the motivation to pick it up until my book club nominated it as our book of the month. That was the push I needed to read it finally.
Yellowface follows June Hayward and Athena Liu, two writers who are more acquaintances than friends. Athena is the shining star of the literary world: young, talented, award-winning, and with a Netflix deal to her name. One night, while celebrating a milestone, Athena dies in a freak accident with June present (not a spoiler, don’t worry).
What follows is a wild spiral: June steals Athena’s unpublished manuscript about Chinese labourers in World War I, rewrites and edits it, and passes it off as her own work. She even goes as far as to publish it under an Asian-sounding name, Juniper Song, complete with racially ambiguous author photos.
Even though she never explicitly says she’s Asian, she leans heavily into that ambiguity. Eventually, controversy arises: how is she able to tell the story of Chinese people as if she were one of them? And it becomes a full-on conversation about cultural appropriation, race, and who gets to tell what story in the publishing industry.
Yellowface Book Review
Yellowface pulls you in from the very first page. I’ve read a couple of boring books recently, but when I read the first few lines of this one, I smiled and just knew it wasn’t going to be one of those.
It’s fast-paced, and we’re stuck inside the mind of a very imperfect and insane main character. We literally watch her unravel, and I loved it.
June wasn’t perfect, she was just being human, but also kind of insane, terribly jealous, whiny, and honestly, quite racist. She doesn’t seem to have any real issues aside from her very warped view of the world. She believes Athena only got her success because of her race, and her sense of entitlement morphs into full-blown resentment.
This book had us rooting for the villain. It’s a “will-she-get-caught?” type of story, and although that tension drives the plot, it does get a little tiring at times. June is so oblivious and self-absorbed that watching her fumble through her delusions gets exhausting. She’s not nearly as smart as she thinks she is.
Juniper is insane, guys. And she’s the narrator. So… how do we even know everything she’s telling us is true?
Everyone reads a book differently, but I read Yellowface as Juniper lying to us the whole time. And I loved that. I even found myself rooting for her, because she’s absolutely insane. I really enjoyed this book. It was fascinating, provocative, and completely unputdownable. I couldn’t even decide if I wanted her to get caught or not.
That’s how twisted it got. June is an awful person, but I was still invested in her story. The more I learned about Athena, the more complex my feelings became – at times, I even understood (though never condoned) June’s choices.
The involvement of social media in the book was super interesting. I usually don’t love it when book discussions and cancel culture end up on social media because sometimes people blow things out of proportion online, and sometimes it’s just… a book.
But in this case, the discourse was based on facts and actual evidence, not just feelings. It was believable, and it made the drama feel very current and real.
The ending didn’t quite land for me. I wanted a more satisfying resolution, something to tell me what became of June after everything came crashing down. Did she learn? Did she recover? Did she vanish into obscurity? We don’t really get that closure. But I get why the ending was left quite open.
Yellowface Blurb
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A REESE”S BOOK CLUB PICK
“Hard to put down, harder to forget.” — Stephen King, #1 New York Times bestselling author
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 labourers 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.
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