Yellowface by Rebecca F. Kuang

 

323 pages

Publisher: The Borough Press

Owned / Trade Paperback

 

Blurb

 THIS IS ONE HELL OF A STORY

IT’S JUST NOT HERS TO TELL

Athena Liu is a literary darling and June Hayward is literally nobody.

WHITE LIES

When Athena dies in a freak accident, June steels her unpublished manuscript and publishes it as her own under the ambiguous name Juniper Song.

DARK HUMOUR

But as evidence threatens June’s stolen success, she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.

DEADLY CONSEQUENCES

What happens next is entirely everyone else’s fault.

 

Review

I’m not sure how I feel about this book. I do know that this is one occasion when I’m rounding my 3.5-star rating down rather than up.

June Hayward and Athena Liu met in college and shared a dream – to write a critically acclaimed bestseller and make it in the literary world. While June’s debut novel didn’t stand out in any way, Athena’s first book shot her straight to the dizzying highs the two young women had been dreaming about. June blames the ‘failure’ of her book on the fact that she’s not interesting enough as a white woman writing a white woman’s story.

When Athena dies in front of her, June gets over the shock quick enough to steal Athena’s just-finished draft. And with that act, and the way she makes up excuses for what she knows is bad behaviour, we know everything we need to know about June’s character – we’re dealing with a selfish opportunist.

From there on, June rewrites Athena’s story and manages to get a publishing contract. She happily agrees to publish her new story under the name Juniper Song and doesn’t object to a somewhat ambiguous author picture either. The book is a huge success, just what June/Juniper has always dreamed about, but it isn’t long before the online reading community starts asking questions. While June/Juniper and her publishing team manage to quell the storm, this is only the start and from that moment forward it is a downhill journey for our thieving author.

There is no doubt that this book is of its time given that it deals with plagiarism, cultural appropriation, and Twitter shitstorms. And all of it is shared with us by an unreliable narrator who lies to us, to the other characters she interacts with, and to herself.

Because the book is told from June/Juniper’s perspective, it is unclear whether the people around her, especially her publishing team, believe what she tells them or simply prefer not to search for the truth. In fact, I’m not sure how aware June herself is of the lies she shares or if she’s buying into the excuses she comes up with. We never really get an explanation as to why June/Juniper pulls the same stunt a second time, given how close she came to losing it all with the first book. We’re also not given a resolution to what’s been happening in the story. When the book ends, all appears to be lost except that June/Juniper turns her downfall into a new opportunity for redemption and future success, be it only in her mind. Or is it?

I guess we’ll never know.

And I guess that’s my main issue with the book. While June/Juniper’s perspective was fascinating in a car crash sort of way, there’s nothing in this story to balance it with. Because we know nothing about those who call her out and attack her on social media, we have no idea about their motivation (beyond outrage over plagiarism). Athena’s mother’s reasons for not wanting to be involved with her daughter’s writing are never explored or explained either. In fact, very little is explored in this book except for June/Juniper’s obsession with making it in the literary world.

Having said all of that, I was impressed with the way Kuang managed to have June/Juniper’s excuses and reasonings almost make sense. The online attacks against June/Juniper felt so familiar that they made me as uncomfortable while reading as they do when I witness them on Twitter in real life. The story clearly indicates how isolating the life of an author can be, and how easy it is for a person to lose perspective when they have nobody around to interact with. And the book definitely provides food for thought about who should write what and why not.

The blurb I found on Goodreads (the version I used above came from the back of my trade paperback) ends with the following paragraph:

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.

While it summarizes the book perfectly, I fear I must have missed something because I didn’t find anything about this story hilarious. But that may be a ‘just me’ situation.

To narrow my thoughts down to one paragraph… Yellowface is a well-written and mostly captivating story. I’m just not sure how much I liked it. Between the unreliable and selfish main character, a serious lack of (sympathetic) secondary characters, and an ending that wasn’t really a resolution, I’m struggling to remember that there were large sections of this book I not only liked but admired.