She’s using the pen name Juniper Song to pretend to be Chinese American. She’s taken new author photos to look more tan and ethnic, but she’s as white as they come. June Hayward, you are a thief and a liar. You’ve stolen my legacy, and now you spit on my grave.” Discover creators, small businesses and communities who can help you dive deeper into the things you care about

i'm being generous already when i say that it is OK, because i personally do not like these kinds of books. while i appreciate the social commentary and the look inside the publishing industry, i found the tone and execution quite heavy-handed. And let’s take this a step further and look at how Kuang illustrated the danger that publishing has ultimately created with it’s use of terms like #ownvoices. Athena wasn’t ever allowed to write outside of trauma. She’s pigeonholed into only writing one thing. And honestly, I’m sure that happens more than we would like to believe. Authors who want to explore something outside of their “assigned” roles either get turned down or the marketing is trash. It delves deeper into the question of who is allowed to tell what story? Was Athena any better of a fit to tell the story of Chinese laborers of WWI than June? Is research enough to tell something outside of one’s lived experience? These are things to think about and something that we are confronted with every day in this community. Think about books like American Dirt and Memoirs of a Geisha. Have you ever read a book that is so timely and effective in its message that you do not feel the slightest bit qualified to review it? That your thoughts on such a masterpiece are not even worthy of being put to paper, literally or figuratively, because they are trite, vapid, and banal in comparison to the quality of the text being discussed? That’s how I feel trying to put the proverbial pen to paper with my thoughts on Yellowface.

Helio relates his abandonment by Lula. Lula still loves him and does not leave him callously, but nevertheless his condition makes it impossible for their romance to continue, and Lula reluctantly severs the relationship. Continuing his odyssey with the Brazilian medical bureaucracy, Helio is admonished that he should have had his workplace issue a letter of disability immediately after the accident; without this, there is no question of full reconstruction being authorized. this was like reading the diary entry of someone who has just had an extremely bad day at work. it was like that trope that seems for some reason very exclusive to the mid-2000s in which people have the worst day of their lives are doomed to relive it, or die and go to purgatory or something like that enjoyed a specific renaissance in spirit in this book. What does colonialism do to a person? As a non-white person growing up in the States, and disliking it, what made me so interested in the UK as a child? Even now? And even more importantly, as a Vietnamese American, what made me so interested in France? And more so in recent years, China and Japan? It's a hard introspective look, to be sure. This book does bring up some interesting points around who gets to tell certain stories and plagiarism. it's now 2023. in short, the ending is less a bang, and more of a whimper. rfk rules out a geoff-style ending for june, someone who disappears quietly from public memory after the scandal and becomes old news. she's too attached to athena's image. this is the right choice--june is too much of a villain-protagonist to get an unearned, 'soft' ending at the end of this. but then the 'crash-and-burn' ending needed to be a lot more to be satisfying for me. we get hallucinations, suicidal ideation, her isolating herself from her support network, all of this building and building and building--and then it goes...

After this, Hayward steals Liu's manuscript about Chinese laborers forcefully conscripted by the French during World War 1. The caucasity is unsurprising, trite, and racist covering all the beats we experienced every time we covered Discourse about films like The Blindside, Hidden Figures Greenbook, and books like The Help, or American Dirt. so, a little too “real world” for my personal reading preferences, but there is no doubt this is a provocative novel that sheds light on various aspects of the book world. Now, she is struggling to write a second book. “I need to write about things that white people don’t see on a daily basis.” This is perhaps the most enlightening line in Kuang’s book — exposing a character who wants all the cultural benefits of being a minority while retaining her privileges as a white person. I reread this for my book club and am so glad we did a buddy read and live show. This is a book worthy of discussion. It has both blatant and nuanced themes of racism and xenophobia that might go over some reader's heads or might seem too in-your-face for others. A group discussion can help reader's recognize the realism of R.F. Kuang's literary approach and see that even if you don't relate to the content, you still have to understand that it's other people's reality. It all boils down to self-interest…If publishing is rigged, you might as well make sure it's rigged in your favor.’

Join the Discussion

June was unhinged. The kind of unhinged that believes her own lies and thinks she is morally in the right. Girl took delulu to another level. What Worked: SO MUCH OF THIS BOOOK WORKED! I’ve seen the countless criticisms of Kuang inserting herself too much into this book as well as the criticisms that indicate that there isn’t much to be gained from reading this book. I wholeheartedly disagree. Oh, my friends, there is much to be gained. Neither of the characters is likeable and that is INTENTIONAL. This isn’t a way to illustrate that everyone in publishing is selfish, but a means to question how much the reader falls into the trap of engaging with the model minority myth. The expectation that Athena is supposed to be likeable is deeply woven in the sociological phenomena that stereotypes many Asian communities as successful, smart, likeable, diligent, docile, etc and the idea that Athena doesn’t fit into that role has made some readers feel uncomfortable whether it is consciously or subconsciously.

Face was okay, but it wasn’t Zephaniah’s best – it was a little too preachy, too much like a moral tale, and it took me a while to get into it. Even once I’d been absorbed into the story line, I didn’t enjoy it much, although I did appreciate that the large print made it easy for me to power through it. Kuang unravels layers of our characters’ histories, complicating the narrative and forcing us to ask: “Who can claim literary authorship over our story?” Martin gets reconstructive surgery but it doesn’t restore his face to its prior condition. Throughout his encounters and experiences that result from this, he learns the error of his ways and realises that you shouldn’t treat people based on how they look but on the person that they are.Helio recalls a time before the accident, when he was living with Lula and enjoying their romantic comradeship. He is talking idly with his mistress when a telegram comes from Rio Piedras, the remote town in the country that he had left years ago for the large, impersonal city of Rio de Janeiro. The telegram reveals that his mother is dying. I usually roll my eyes when people call a book “compulsively readable”, but in this case, I get it.

Overall, this was an average book, definitely not the riveting book, have to read in one sitting book that the world has lost its mind over. Was I not meant to admit that? Should I have, instead, gone on long, rambling, and yet tersely flat paragraphs about how ironic it is that I am negatively critiquing a book about plagiarism by using the same points as everyone else? Should I call this satire—granted that there is nothing humorous and that I am not particularly strongly exaggerating anything—as I amateurly write prose so unabashedly written in my own voice that it would be impossible to separate any idea from my own? Because that appears to be the direction this book has gone in.i’ve decided not to include any quotes from the book and talk in general terms with minor details to avoid spoilers (not anything that’s not in the premise, anyway), but i’m still talking about how i felt about different parts of the book, including the middle and end, even though I won’t be talking about what happens in them. so if you want to go in blind, beware. i know this runs the risk of me describing something one way, but then you going and reading it and interpreting a different way, but until it actually comes out and i can drop the ‘extended’ (and hopefully more sophisticated) review, this will have to do.