Yellowface: A Chilling Novel of Racism and Cultural Appropriation from the author of Katabasis
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK
“Hard to put down, harder to forget.” — Stephen King, #1 New York Times bestselling author
White lies. Dark humor. Deadly consequences… 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, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Babel.
Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. But Athena’s a literary darling. June Hayward is literally nobody. Who 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 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 grapples with questions of diversity, racism, and cultural appropriation, as well as the terrifying alienation of social media. R.F. Kuang’s novel is timely, razor-sharp, and eminently readable.
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Community Reviews
I think I went into this with higher expectations after hearing so much about R.F. Kuang, so that was sort of disappointing, though I did hear that her fantasy series is way better and I'm still super excited to read Babel.
What I thought was most interesting about this book was that June actually got me on her side at the beginning. I was super nervous that she was going to get caught and actively didn't want her to be caught despite knowing that she had stolen Athena's manuscript and was doing a bad thing. I think that was the power of Kuang's writing - it is hard to write a sympathetic villain, and she really pulled it off. I loved the gradual reveal of how unhinged and deluded she was as well, like as things develop, June really showed how terrible she was while continuing to justify her actions. It was like watching a trainwreck develop in slow motion and being unable to stop it from happening.
(Never was I more mad than when she said that soup dumplings sounded disgusting. They are DELICIOUS THANK YOU VERY MUCH!)
This book also reminded me of why the internet is terrible (even though June deserved her criticism) and frustrated me regarding cancel culture and all of that. It's a problem that exists in every corner of the internet now, and I think my distaste for it was what originally got me on June's side in the beginning with the online bullying and harassment and general mob hivemind that I see everywhere.
It's a novel asking "Who has the right to tell whose stories? What makes one person qualified over another?" And as one reviewer says: It's a story about the lies people tell to rationalize their own behaviors, the myths they construct around themselves to be able to move through the world, and what a woman is willing to do to reinvent herself in her own eyes.
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