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A review by fayebean
Yellowface by R.F. Kuang
3.0
Like a trainwreck in slowmotion. June Hayward is a white woman who steals her friend Athena Liu's manuscript about Chinese laborers during WWI. She publishes Athena's novel under the new name Juniper Song.
Kuang is talented, observant, and irreverent. This is a heavy-handed critique of the publishing industry and the book community's social media landscape. June presents as a sociopath, mean, and a degenerate and she is enabled by a racist publishing industry that packages books and the authors who write them into tokenized commodities. The book gets uneven towards the climax but it is engrossing. No shades of gray here and it makes its point very clearly. I look forward to reading more of Kuang's work.
Kuang is talented, observant, and irreverent. This is a heavy-handed critique of the publishing industry and the book community's social media landscape. June presents as a sociopath, mean, and a degenerate and she is enabled by a racist publishing industry that packages books and the authors who write them into tokenized commodities. The book gets uneven towards the climax but it is engrossing. No shades of gray here and it makes its point very clearly. I look forward to reading more of Kuang's work.