Yellowface is a messy woman/disaster story in the best possible way. It’s the sort of book that will have you inwardly yelling at the protagonist about her bad choices but you don’t want to stop reading because you just have to find out how it all ends.
June Hayward is an author of small success. Her debut novel has been forgotten and she isn’t making any progress on a new one. She works as a tutor, hanging on the fringes of the literary world. Athena Liu seems to be everything June is not. Athena is beautiful, confident, a literary darling. Her books are financial successes, receive rave reviews, and are optioned for film. The two women are friends of a sort. Having gone to university together, they are thrown together over the years, meeting up at sporadic times. While far from intimate friends, they share history together. When Athena dies in a freak accident, June just so happens to be present in Athena’s apartment.
She leaves that night with the manuscript of Athena’s next novel in her bag. June doesn’t intend to steal it. No, of course not. But when she begins to read the draft, she starts to see how she could add to it, improve it, make it her own. It doesn’t take much until she begins to see it as her own. And before she knows it, June is rebranding herself as Juniper Song and is being catapulted to literary success.
What really works in this book’s favour is that while almost all of June’s decisions are terrible, she makes them in small enough increments that it isn’t too hard to understand how she ends up where she does. June is objectively terrible but so are a lot of the people around her. Maybe including Athena too.
Central to the novel’s conflict too is the question of who stories belong to. Not just in questions of editing and redrafting, though that is definitely an important question, but culturally too. The stolen novel at the centre of Yellowface is called The Last Call and it’s about the Chinese Labour Corps in World War I. (Rather coincidentally, I had never heard about this part of history until I read Janie Chang’s Porcelain Moon earlier this year which is a novel exactly about this.) Athena is Chinese-American while June is a white woman. Publishing under her full first name and her middle name – Juniper Song – gives her an ethnic ambiguity but does that give her the right to profit off the stories of another culture?
But Kuang excels at shades of grey as we learn more about Athena and the ways in which she too might have borrowed stories from others. Is that kind of theft worse or different than the kind that June perpetrates?
There’s a lot here left up to the reader to decide and I appreciated that. I did find the ending a little over the top and melodramatic, even while I enjoyed it. The novel paints the writing world and publishing as very cutthroat and competitive, which has never been my experience but I also can’t say I’ve delved too deeply.
Definitely recommend as a fun but thoughtful, somewhat suspenseful summer-type read!
Karissa Reads Books 
I can’t wait to read this!
It’s really fun!
Oh, good!
I would say the writing world is pretty competitive, throw it off and looks more like gossip and backstabbing. Then outright stealing. People are definitely talking about each other. This book is already on my TBR. Each new review that I read of it adds something to the book, which is why reviews are so interesting.
I think the conversation about what constitutes stealing is really interesting. You can’t trademark ideas but we also understand that it’s not okay to capitalize on someone else’s idea.
I know there were others who were very competitive when I was in my writing program but I never personally felt a lot of that pressure. And when I worked in publishing it was overall a very friendly atmosphere but maybe it’s different from the writers’ perspective?
Good call. Notre Dame had a 5% acceptance rate, so people felt the need to prove they belonged there.
I think there were definitely those people in my program but overall it felt more like people working side-by-side rather than in competition. That said, I am a super non-competitive person so it’s possible that my perspective is different from others’.
I’m jealous of your non-competitive nature. You must feel so independent moving through life!
Sort of, haha! It’s funny because I can still care a lot about what other people think, I just don’t care about being compared to other people. That seems irrelevant to me. And anything that wants to pit me against others, I pretty much immediately want to get out of there.
That makes me wonder if you think people are judging you compared to old versions of yourself. Otherwise, if they were judging you compared to them themselves, that’s competitive, and you would get out of there.
Hmmm…that’s an interesting thought. I’m not totally sure. As a student, or even in jobs, I have found myself forced into competitive situations that people assume will be motivating but for me it’s the opposite. Yet I can’t remove myself from the situation so I would end up just sort of struggling through it. Fortunately it’s not something that happens much anymore.
Oof, that sounds like a classic case of a person who thinks what works for them works for everyone, because you just need to try harder! I am learning that this very thinking is CRUSHING to people with ADHD, like my husband.
I’m so curious about this book, I’ve heard wonderful things and its about publishing which I love.
I think you would enjoy it! Especially knowing the book world as you do.
[…] Yellowface.– R.F. Kuang […]
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