the only reason this isnt getting 5 stars is because of a personal problem. i have a really weird pet peeve of real world things mentioned in fiction. i like realistic/contemporary stories, but pop culture references bug the crap out of me. so all of the talk of US politics and presidents, very real famous authors, even the commentary about goodreads and tiktok, took me out of the story. So I don't really feel like we were making progress in this novel because I would not have given any credence to these naysayers. Remarkably, I found myself attached to a book despite disliking the main character. At times, I wished I could physically enter the story and confront June Hayward/ Juniper Song, who committed the ultimate crime: stealing her late friend Athena Liu's unpublished book. The reasons behind this act of creative theft are complex and include jealousy, thirst for power, honoring her friend's work in the best way possible, and seeking personal gain. It is a tale that explores unfairness, harbored resentment, and a thirst for karmic justice. BABEL Yeah, it's not one of those 'if you like this you'll like that' situations. This book is different in every aspect, if I hadn't known I wouldn't think it was written by the same person. BUT IT'S EQUALLY AS BRILLIANT. Doesn't that really picture the talent and originality of this writer? 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...

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… She explored every possible aspect or every question you might have, every side you could possibly take on this subject, doesn't leave much room for the reviewer, but I'm not complaining (I like my thoughts planted) The other characters are additionally well written - with their portrayals remaining relatable throughout, thanks to Zephaniah's realistic youth dialogue. Fleshing out a very clear world these young characters live in, with the change in dialogue between speaking with their child counterparts and adults conveying an accurate fictional narrative, within a non-fictional setting. I did like his friends from after the accident the Jamaican sisters and Anthony. I thought that they were interesting and unique characters and I would have loved to learn more about them. it's certainly well-written, but personally i didn't like the writing style or the narrative voice. i know rfk intended the characters to be unlikeable, but i did not root for them at any point of the book. i was irritated most of the time, so i can't really say that i enjoyed reading this. i've read my fair share of books peopled with unlikeable characters, but this one here is just unbearable and repetitive. it got so boring the last third of the book that i had to take a nap before continuing.

What astounded me most was how legitimately real her voice was. Hats off to Rebecca Kuang. She killed this. with some personal favourites like ‘the plot,’ ‘a ladder to the sky,’ and ‘kill all your darlings,’ im no stranger to a plot about plagiarism. but what makes this book stand out from the others is its hard hitting commentary about the publishing world. in line with the theme of the book, i’m going to completely steal another reviewer’s words that i can’t stop thinking about. 'the problem with kuang is that, despite a reputation for in-depth research, she refuses to interrogate beyond her scope.' go read it. and i’d like to add to that: a lot of her most avid readers don’t have the appetite for anything beyond that, either. and take it incredibly personally when at the end of the meal, you’re still hungry.

Madelein L'Engle said, "You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children." If Rebbeca Kuang saw this quote, she must have mixed it up because she wrote this book as though it's meant for children who want to graduate to adult fiction. 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. At the most basic of levels, Yellowface is a mash of various genres that follows the passive aggressive “friendship” of Athena and June, two authors in the publishing industry with very different levels of success. Athena has received her big break while June has remained a struggling author. In an absurd (truly absurd if I’m being quite honest haha) turn of events, Athena chokes while engaging in a pancake eating contest with June. After her death, June makes the decision to steal one of her manuscripts and pass it off as her own. What follows next is chaotic descent into the world of publishing and the book community.Helio relates his abandonment by Lula. Lula still loves him and does not leave him callously, but nevertheless his condition makes it impossible for their romance to continue, and Lula reluctantly severs the relationship. Continuing his odyssey with the Brazilian medical bureaucracy, Helio is admonished that he should have had his workplace issue a letter of disability immediately after the accident; without this, there is no question of full reconstruction being authorized. 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 found this issue of plagiarism particularly ironic because Yellowface didn't strike me as very original, essentially a mashup of The Plot by Jean Hanoff Korelitz and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L Frank Baum. Furthermore, RF Kuang had a scene in The Poppy War (published 2018) where the main character was training by carrying a pig up a mountain.

So even though I didn’t agree with all of Kuang’s satirical commentary in Yellowface (e.g., I think Asian Americans should be asked hard, critical questions about glorifying whiteness both in dating partners and in other areas of life), I respect that she seized a popular topic in the publishing industry and made a novel out of it. The exaggerated nature of satire doesn’t always lend itself to a deeper emotional connection with the characters or the story, though I don’t think a deep emotional connection is necessarily the point of this novel. Overall, while I don’t see this novel breaking into my top ten list at the end of this year, I found it an interesting read and one that may be fun to discuss. 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.

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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. One of the standout aspects of the book is the author's astute commentary on the perils faced by writers, such as internet trolls who use their freedom of speech rights to berate and belittle their creations. The story skillfully examines the commodification of writers, where their looks, personality, color of their skin and online presence become as important as their writing itself. I reread this for my book club and am so glad we did a buddy read and live show. This is a book worthy of discussion. It has both blatant and nuanced themes of racism and xenophobia that might go over some reader's heads or might seem too in-your-face for others. A group discussion can help reader's recognize the realism of R.F. Kuang's literary approach and see that even if you don't relate to the content, you still have to understand that it's other people's reality. The first problem I had was with Martin and his two friends called Matthew and Mark, it took me until the accident to be able to differentiate between the two of them and at that point they became much small characters. While they seemed like they could have been more interesting it also seemed as though they were assigned one character trait and that was the whole basis of who they were. Little depth was given to them.