Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

Pages: 350 

Publisher: The Borough Press 

Released: 16th of May 2023 

What's the harm in a pseudonym? New York Times 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 in the vein of White Ivy and The Other Black Girl.

Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars: same year at Yale, same debut year in publishing. But Athena's a cross-genre literary darling, and June didn't even get a paperback release. Nobody 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 laborers to the British and French war efforts 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 takes on questions of diversity, racism, and cultural appropriation not only in the publishing industry but the persistent erasure of Asian-American voices and history by Western white society. R. F. Kuang's novel is timely, razor-sharp, and eminently readable.

What I Have to Say 

This book was truly fascinating. R.F. Kuang threw up all sorts of questions around morality, ethics and some of the biggest discourses in publishing and let the reader make up their mind what they thought. While Babel had a lot of dialogue about how the things portrayed in the novel were bad, Yellowface took the viewpoint of the bad guy and gave absolutely no handholding. We are to judge Juniper's actions by ourselves. 

Obviously Juniper does a lot of bad stuff in this novel. I was really interested to see how insidious the racism was. It would have been easy to show a raving mad lunatic with yellow fever in this book, but that wouldn't be an accurate representation of society. Juniper believes herself to be liberal. Her racist views come to light slowly and in tiny fragments over the course of the novel. This approach highlighted how easily these kinds of views take root. 

If I had to pick one thing I like most about this book, it's how much it's made me think. Though it's written in a more approachable style than Babel, it's still a very intellectual book and will leave you with a lot to talk about. 

4 stars 

My thanks go to the Borough Press and Netgalley for providing me with this copy for review.