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
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Wow, âYellowface.â This was such a fantastic read & I finished it in a single day. While it wasnât on the same level as âBabelâ (few books ever will be) it was such an interesting perspective to read in conjunction with the previous novel.
To start off: Kuangâs protagonist June Hayward (who later stylizes her name as Juniper Song) works well as an unreliable narrator. She withholds information, is incapable of seeing events from other peopleâs points of view, and generally thinks sheâs smarter than she actually is. Her character reminded me a bit of narcissistic criminals who get caught because they either donât know how to act like an innocent person, or they think theyâre a mastermind who will never be caught.
June functions as a vessel for the larger conversations that âYellowfaceâ attracts, both in the novelâs world and our own. Early on in the book she steals her newly deceased friendâs unpublished manuscript and passes it off as her own; this, of course, is Very Bad. But the bookâs own discourse surrounding the early days of her newfound literary success includes both criticism and praise for her writing & research of a little-known area of Chinese history. Is it okay to write about characters outside her own race? Had she not been marketed as possibly Asian herself, could some of the later fallout been avoided?
I have been continuously thinking about this book since I finished it, and while it does read as (on paper) similar to Kuangâs real life experiencesâwhy is that a bad thing? Her commentary on June, Athena, and the publishing industry as a whole packs a heavy-hitting punch. But just as importantly, it forces her audience to confront our own understanding of the relationship between identity & art.
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