The book is set in a fairly ethnically-diverse area of London and—before his accident—Martin is relatively prejudiced towards the majority of people who are different to him. As a white male, Martin had not really come across any level of adversity in his life until he was scarred, but after he finds life more challenging. His friends begin to drift away from him, his girlfriend leaves him and, generally, people start treating him differently because of the way he looks with the burns. The most insidious moment sees June travels to Washington DC’s Chinatown for “inspiration” to “find some good narrative potential” at a Chinese restaurant, accosting an innocent waiter and demanding he tell her something interesting about himself. Utterly oblivious to her imperial, colonialist mindset, this scene made my brain writhe in disgust, perhaps because it speaks so close to reality. It all boils down to self-interest…If publishing is rigged, you might as well make sure it's rigged in your favor.’ I’ll be honest, I read this book in a single sitting. I could not look away, and Kuang’s writing sweeps you up in it’s conversational cadance. While I’ve enjoyed Kuang’s writing previously, Yellowface feels very polished and matured, the novel reading with the ease and eagerness of a tell-all memoir, which is the framing of the story. As a fictional memoir, it drops a lot of pop culture references to key into a specific time. Kuang’s choice of perspective through June—who rebrands at the request of her publisher as Juniper Song, Song being her middle-name but also nudges readers to think she may have Chinese heritage—is brilliant as it allows us to feel the floor-dropping-out discomfort of becoming the focus of internet rage as well as navigate a vigorous criticism of the publishing industry. Kuang is able to cover issues without moralizing, making the reader sift through alternating opinions that are likely to expose their own assumptions and discomforts, and we must always remember the telling is often guiding us away from judging her and towards everyone else. With a big confession at the center, June can manipulate the reader on smaller issues and in a way it becomes a rather metafictional approach to the way storytelling is just that: fictionalizing stories. and to be clear, this isn't a blanket response to everyone who disagrees with me (i've had interesting conversations with people who do)--just to some people who are determined to take the most uncharitable opinion possible of a frankly lukewarm review.

I usually roll my eyes when people call a book “compulsively readable”, but in this case, I get it. Sustaining the fraud in the eye of the storm requires ever more manic deception – and self-deception. After all, didn’t Juniper simply midwife a far-from-ready draft that might otherwise never have seen daylight? And in the first place, hadn’t Athena once strip-mined sensitive details of Juniper’s personal life for an early short story? And it’s so hard for white writers to catch a break these days…it's now 2023. in short, the ending is less a bang, and more of a whimper. rfk rules out a geoff-style ending for june, someone who disappears quietly from public memory after the scandal and becomes old news. she's too attached to athena's image. this is the right choice--june is too much of a villain-protagonist to get an unearned, 'soft' ending at the end of this. but then the 'crash-and-burn' ending needed to be a lot more to be satisfying for me. we get hallucinations, suicidal ideation, her isolating herself from her support network, all of this building and building and building--and then it goes... so, a little too “real world” for my personal reading preferences, but there is no doubt this is a provocative novel that sheds light on various aspects of the book world. Is this book satire? Obviously and not quite so much. What I mean is, it’s clearly satire, but to an extent that these characters are not exact flesh and blood, but the issues discussed in this book are far from farcical. Most reviewers have noticed the central themes in Yellowface rearing their ugly head in the real world, especially in the past few years, so it is refreshing and exhilarating to read a fictional novel encompassing these issues in a way that only R.F. Kuang could create. Effortlessly create reels from trending templates, or let your creativity shine with a full suite of editing tools

What Worked: SO MUCH OF THIS BOOOK WORKED! I’ve seen the countless criticisms of Kuang inserting herself too much into this book as well as the criticisms that indicate that there isn’t much to be gained from reading this book. I wholeheartedly disagree. Oh, my friends, there is much to be gained. Neither of the characters is likeable and that is INTENTIONAL. This isn’t a way to illustrate that everyone in publishing is selfish, but a means to question how much the reader falls into the trap of engaging with the model minority myth. The expectation that Athena is supposed to be likeable is deeply woven in the sociological phenomena that stereotypes many Asian communities as successful, smart, likeable, diligent, docile, etc and the idea that Athena doesn’t fit into that role has made some readers feel uncomfortable whether it is consciously or subconsciously.With this being my 3rd reading of 'Face' (reading the book twice, and the play once), I still love this book and the message it teaches the reader. i’ve decided not to include any quotes from the book and talk in general terms with minor details to avoid spoilers (not anything that’s not in the premise, anyway), but i’m still talking about how i felt about different parts of the book, including the middle and end, even though I won’t be talking about what happens in them. so if you want to go in blind, beware. i know this runs the risk of me describing something one way, but then you going and reading it and interpreting a different way, but until it actually comes out and i can drop the ‘extended’ (and hopefully more sophisticated) review, this will have to do. which was a big thing that irked me with tpw. people would make criticisms of rfk's narrative choices and plot points and the response would be ‘well, rin is an unreliable narrator!’ yes, but there is such thing as framing and context which are important things to consider when trying to figure out what an author actually is saying, intentionally or not. but anyways.) i'm being generous already when i say that it is OK, because i personally do not like these kinds of books. while i appreciate the social commentary and the look inside the publishing industry, i found the tone and execution quite heavy-handed.

Sounds a bit fake, but I genuinely think R. F. Kuang was the right person to tell this story. No matter how many times she REINVENTS herself, the story always feels like it was made just and only for her. I can't wait to read the Poppy War trilogy. The ensuing story is told in such an unreliable, insidious way that it creeps under your skin. What’s so scary is that it’s 100% believable. You can follow June’s descent into worse and worse offenses (though she started out pretty damn bad), while at every step the reader is trapped in her head as she justifies why she is the one in the right, the victim.

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The appropriation of history, the historicization of the past, the narrativization of society, all of which give the novel its force, include the accumulation and differentiation of social space, space to be used for social purposes.’ Yellowface is about June Heyward who steals a manuscript from her best-selling author frenemy. After her friend dies in a bizarre accident, June polishes up the prose and sells the book as her own without crediting her friend. I really wanted to like this book. The cover is good and thought provoking and the concept behind it was really interesting. I feel like if it had been executed better this book could have been brilliant. Unfortunately it wasn't. And let’s take this a step further and look at how Kuang illustrated the danger that publishing has ultimately created with it’s use of terms like #ownvoices. Athena wasn’t ever allowed to write outside of trauma. She’s pigeonholed into only writing one thing. And honestly, I’m sure that happens more than we would like to believe. Authors who want to explore something outside of their “assigned” roles either get turned down or the marketing is trash. It delves deeper into the question of who is allowed to tell what story? Was Athena any better of a fit to tell the story of Chinese laborers of WWI than June? Is research enough to tell something outside of one’s lived experience? These are things to think about and something that we are confronted with every day in this community. Think about books like American Dirt and Memoirs of a Geisha.