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shepgreg 's review for:
Yellowface
by R.F. Kuang
It's a hard one to review. 3 suggests mediocre to decent.if nothing special. It's not that at all. It's in parts genuinely brilliant and in parts genuinely awful.
Athena and June are two of the brilliant monsters in fiction. It's very obvious Athena is broadly Kuang but really that's just the outline, June is also clearly Kuang. The grasping insecure part of her nature or at the very least Kuang is of the devil's party but does not know it.
Unfortunately the amazing story about the borderline sociopathic literary darling and the insecure and jealous barely friend who steals from her is kind of ruined by the far less brilliant satire of race in the publishing industry.
The novel is from June's perspective and the biggest issue is the a fundamental disconnect between June and her inner world and the dumb racist stuff the book has her do when the plot kicks in and the characterisation of June goes out of the window in service of some really unsubtle on the nose stuff.
There's nothing wrong with June being a bit racist and what she does being racially dubious at best and a satire on the racism of the publishing industry. However if you want that to work you have to put those things in the context of the rest of the character and not be completely at odds with every other part of her behaviour.
Kuang uses a wrecking ball when she needed to use a scapel. What needs to be subtle and insidious is cartoonish.and rings so false and hollow as result.
Like a key inciting incident of the book and when the issues start is when June refuses a sensitivity reader. There's literally no reason, it goes against type. It's the sort of thing June would have jumped for because it would legitimise her and she understands the market and the media ecosphere she lives in and the value in having that in her back pocket.
But she has to oppose it irrationally because that's what a reactionary dumb racist would do, but everything we know about June she wouldn't. The book would have been better and made a better point if she and her publisher used the sensitivity reader cynically etc and the whole of it made more subtle and less obvious.
And there's so much else like this where the character as we are reading her is just so disassociated from what the book is having her do and say and occasionally think, it's absurd.
Athena and June are two of the brilliant monsters in fiction. It's very obvious Athena is broadly Kuang but really that's just the outline, June is also clearly Kuang. The grasping insecure part of her nature or at the very least Kuang is of the devil's party but does not know it.
Unfortunately the amazing story about the borderline sociopathic literary darling and the insecure and jealous barely friend who steals from her is kind of ruined by the far less brilliant satire of race in the publishing industry.
The novel is from June's perspective and the biggest issue is the a fundamental disconnect between June and her inner world and the dumb racist stuff the book has her do when the plot kicks in and the characterisation of June goes out of the window in service of some really unsubtle on the nose stuff.
There's nothing wrong with June being a bit racist and what she does being racially dubious at best and a satire on the racism of the publishing industry. However if you want that to work you have to put those things in the context of the rest of the character and not be completely at odds with every other part of her behaviour.
Kuang uses a wrecking ball when she needed to use a scapel. What needs to be subtle and insidious is cartoonish.and rings so false and hollow as result.
Like a key inciting incident of the book and when the issues start is when June refuses a sensitivity reader. There's literally no reason, it goes against type. It's the sort of thing June would have jumped for because it would legitimise her and she understands the market and the media ecosphere she lives in and the value in having that in her back pocket.
But she has to oppose it irrationally because that's what a reactionary dumb racist would do, but everything we know about June she wouldn't. The book would have been better and made a better point if she and her publisher used the sensitivity reader cynically etc and the whole of it made more subtle and less obvious.
And there's so much else like this where the character as we are reading her is just so disassociated from what the book is having her do and say and occasionally think, it's absurd.