Great read! I finished this book in a day. SUPER fast paced, literary thriller spilling all the dark tea about the publishing industry, especially POC in publishing. If you enjoyed the literary satire Disorientation about a white person appropriating another culture, Yellowface explores the similar theme but in a more fun, twisty, entertaining way. The main plot follows a white failing writer who is kind of friends with a super successful literary Asian American writer. There were twists which make you gasp even though they are predictable at times. All the characters are unlikeable and purely selfish. I didn't root for a single character. But I loved the read and the way it kept me turning pages. There is so much literary drama that this one is like a Bible of all the literary drama on Twitter. I could remember so many incidents that actually happened in real life and are referenced in the book as happening to the characters. This would make a great book club read. Don't blame me if you book meeting stretches for hours with all the gossip.

What I keep thinking about?
This is a first person narration, narrated by a white girl who takes advantage of her Asian American dead friend. I love unlikeable characters that get under your skin. In this novel, the white girl who appropriates her friend's research on Chinese history (and her book), tells the story—her friend's story, their friendship's story, her bad decisions and plagiarism, her decline, her victim blaming etc. It feels a bit too convenient, like a villain character created to have her finger in every pie and touch all the drama in the literary world in real life. Less of the character as a person and more of the character as a means to tell the story. Inspite of the first person narration, the white writer seemed closed off about her vulnerabilities and crimes: more of a fictional character on the page. Sometimes the scenes are just literary drama that you wonder where the 'personhood' of the characters (not just the protagonist) are. This bothered me a bit because RF Kuang does excellent character sketches (read The Poppy War if you haven't already). I wonder what was the motive behind the choice of POV. I am all eager to read every interview RF Kuang gives.

Would recommend for a pacy, thrilling reading session. So much to discuss. Also this is gonna rile up a lot of white people. Everything's fictional but if you've been around on Twitter long enough, you just KNOW THINGS.

Wow. Rebecca Kuang really just wrote this masterpiece. The first 30% sold this to me as a five star- and I was right.

June, as our very biased narrator, tells us a story of envy and deception. How this deception of plagiarizing her deceased friend's unpublished work took her to the highest highs and then led to her eventual downfall.

God, reading this had my blood BOILING. June excuses her racist behaviour and thoughts away by hiding behind her 'liberal' label and by saying: "Hey, I donate to AAPI organisations therefore I am not racist!".
Plus her very racist inner monologues in which she tries very hard to convince us that she ISNT RACIST. SHE'S A DEMOCRAT! SHE VOTED BIDEN!

June, babes can I pull you for a chat because this doesn't automatically make you an ally🤪

Back to the actual story, June steals a Athena's work (who is Chinese American) and decides hey, ho! Let's colonise her work! AND OFF SHE GOES twisting Athena's words into a caricature of what she had originally intended.

This book does an EXCELLENT job at balancing the boundary of cancel culture and actually calling out people like June.

Anyway without further spoilers from yours truly, this book was a wonderful ride (including the amazing lil plot twist at the end I almost choked dang).

Anyway R. F. Kuang I love you❤️

In a short but memorable novel, Kuang explores the intersections of race, ethics and publishing in a compelling story about the theft of a deceased Asian-American author's manuscript by a white author. The main character's internal monologue can be so despicable that the novel itself can be difficult to read at times - this is a book that is sure to initiate valuable conversations about discrimination, legacy, and identity.

When I started this book I had no knowledge of how anxiety ridden, edge of the seat, modern and meta it will be. It's strange to see the author who I admire talk about BTS, Untamed, Twitter and Tiktok in a single book. A thriller masked as a literary fiction, this book seems like a social commentary on the world of authors and the writing industry. This book brings the readers, publishers, authors, struggling writers and reviewers together and collectively observes them.
It made me very reminiscent of Stargazer by Laurie Petrou where we can see how envy in young girls can take an ugly form, Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier - someone's past haunting your future and keeping you in the wake of it and Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid- how social media can play a big part in making or breaking someone's life. Adding in the vast expanse of the publishing world- i had no idea it was such a hectic world and the importance of good literary agents.

I still feel like this was an experiment conducted by RFK to observe our reactions on this. She is probably sitting in her cozy chair observing the reviewers leaving their tiny yellow starred reviews on Goodreads and reading them. So different from her previous works which were heavily fantasy based.

Right off the bat I HATED Juniper Hayward and Athena Liu; such snobby, privileged, entitled, frustrating and flawed characters that star as the main leads. Athena is a successful author and Juniper is a <i>struggling</i> author trying to make her ends meet. An opportunity strikes when Juniper decides to make her friend's work as hers. It's a great idea especially since Athena is no where around and doesn't really have that many people. This leads to a crazy journey with a mountain of lies, betrayals and crime (not on the paper, ofcourse 😉).

A book that was a window into the world of authors. I had assumed that as an author writing takes up most of their works but I realised it go beyond- cultural background, social media presence, promotions, hashtag worlds, critics and agencies. All in all, I have a newfound respect for authors after this.

It's been two days since I finished and this book still pops up in my mind when I'm on twitter or scrolling through my insta feed. Thinking about it, makes me panic for Juniper. She set up her own trap and she just couldn't stop herself from being her own worst enemy. I empathise with her but goddamn she was sooo frustarting to read. I had various instances where she would be being her despicable self and had to stop myself from rolling my eyes and exclaiming “stop crying and work, girl”. Athena is another case, but I would refrain before I spill anything spoiler-ish.

A short thriller/lit fic that one can read in few sittings.
Brilliant, gripping, absolutely disliked the lead character but couldn't help sympathise with her. A thriller masked as lit fiction. A book that is very much relevant to the current times.
Kuang once again proves she is here to stay in the writing world- be it literary fiction, historical fiction or fantasy.
Thank you to Netgalley, HarperCollins UK and Harper Fiction for this arc. I will be forever thankful for this opportunity. ❤️

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 look inside the publishing industry and social commentary, i found the tone and execution quite heavy-handed.

it's certainly well-written, but personally i didn't like the writing style or the narrative voice. i know rfk intended the characters to be unlikeable, but i did not root for them at any point of the book. i was irritated most of the time, so i can't really say that i enjoyed reading this. i've read my fair share of books peopled with unlikeable characters, but this one here is just unbearable and repetitive. it got so boring the last third of the book that i had to take a nap before continuing.

i think my main problem is that the author's personal voice bleeds through the text and does not give the reader much room to think. rfk frames the story in a way that clearly shows the readers what she thinks and, in a way, she's telling us what to think. in tpw i excused it as a debut author's mistake, while in babel i found her passion about the themes charming— but here in yellowface i realize that rfk is unfortunately incapable of separating her own voice from the text, which is very grating to my brain. i won't get into the specifics, but it's just SO irritating to read. i also think that i would have appreciated the book more had it cut back on the pop culture references (which i do not think will age well btw). i would have liked this more had it been written with more finesse and subtlety. i don't know how to word this better but the author needs to learn how to write better.

anyway, i don't think rfk is cut out to write in this genre. my review is posted on Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4817994764?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1

this is a masterclass in writing from the point of view of an unlikeable protagonist. at first, June makes bad, snap decisions and the second-hand anxiety is intense. but the more she doubles down and lets slip her racism and her white saviour complex, the more gripping the story gets.

The newest publication from literary sensation R.F Kuang, ‘Yellowface’ is a fascinating read where, following the death of her asian friend (a highly successful writer), a white author takes the ladies unfinished work and publishes it as her own.

This was unlike anything I’ve read by Kuang before - the writing is less complex, it is a contemporary novel; the masterful world building we bore witness to in ‘the poppy war’ trilogy is no longer needed. But rest assured; the clever characterisation, the addictive prose and the lifetime messages that translate to every generation and every place remain.

This is utterly genius. In a fictionalised form, the white protagonist is a mockery - how absurd, we think - until we realise this novel is hardly fiction. Sure, the plot of her dead friend and the names of the characters themselves are Kuang’s creation, but the messages evoked are all too recognisable. It tackles just how apparent the need for diversity across every sphere of the publishing industry is, how white authors feel as though THEY are the victims when eyebrows are raised when they write voices that are not their own and (white) authors create a facade of racial ambiguity with carefully selected filters in order to avoid any questions regarding their research process.. By reading this characters internal monologue - it is apparent how many of these messages are transferable to authors of today; those who write harmful stereotypes harmful to the communities they claim to represent.

Phenomenally written, a vital message to publishers, writers and readers alike.

Thank you to NetGalley and the team at HarperCollins for the ARC xo ❤️

Yellowface is told in first person from the character of June Hayward. This is a literary fiction novel that is quite different from Kuang's previous books. Everyone loves Athena Liu but nobody knows June Hayward. June is extremely jealous of Athena. Athena ends up dead but June has her unfinished manuscript. June decides to plagiarize Athena's manuscript but edits it to change certain things. There is a mystery element to the story. First off this book is extremely well written and I haven't read a story like this before. I really liked how microaggressions were subtly laced in the novel to make you question things. For example, June starts complaining that sometimes her publisher team got her name wrong because they didn't take notice of her. When many POC have their name purposefully mispronounced and are ignored in publishing. However, this felt a little too on the nose in parts and June was a painful protagonist because as a reader it was frustrating to hear her stereotypes and microaggressions towards Chinese and Korean people. Also some of the references could be outdated in a few years. Overall, I would definitely recommend this to people and think everyone could get something out of this novel. My rating is 3.5 stars rounded to a 4.

I haven’t read anything by RF Kuang before, but I gather this is a bit of a departure from her previous work. Yellowface is narrated by white girl June, a struggling writer whose sole published novel was a miserable failure. A casual friendship with current literary darling, Chinese-American Athena Liu, leads to a sudden opportunity when Athena dies in an accident and June steals her unpublished manuscript. Athena’s novel turns out to be an epic war story about the experiences of men in the Chinese Labour Corps during WWI – and June doesn’t quite get it, but she rewrites it anyway. Cue fame and fortune – but will June’s theft be discovered?

This satirical novel recalls other recent thrillers about stealing other people’s ideas – Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Plot and Andrew Lipstein’s Last Resort spring to mind – but also has more important things to say about racism in publishing. It’s interesting on the responsibilities you take on when telling stories that are not your own. June is the most egregious example, but, if we can trust her narration, she suggests that Athena encouraged others to share their traumatic life stories with her for ‘copy’, even borrowing turns of phrase from June after she tells her about a sexual assault. Here, it made me think of Lee Cole’s Groundskeeping, which treats this question of how much we can take from others very seriously.

Kuang rightly argues that the seeming success of ‘diverse’ writers often hides deeper racism in the publishing industry, as certain writers are selected to be the ‘token Asian’ who has to write about ‘ethnic themes’, while others are ignored because ‘we already have an Asian writer’. However, I found that, by the end of Yellowface, these points were spelt out too clearly to the reader for this to be a really successful novel. Ironically, I also felt that Kuang leant too hard on June’s individual villainy and did not spend enough time skewering the industry itself. Characters say things about how bad the industry is, but there’s still a sense that good writers get what they deserve – Athena’s manuscript is picked up despite being submitted by an unsuccessful writer with ‘bad track’, and a minor character secures the deal she wanted, seemingly confirming June’s confident statement that she’s bound to get published because she’s both Asian and queer. Finally, June herself didn’t quite ring true to me. She switches between knowing what the ‘politically correct’ thing is to do (and often ignoring it) and being totally oblivious to how she’s coming across. I felt that she would have been savvier about some of the decisions she made, if only to secure her own success and self-aggrandisement.

This was completely gripping – I read it in the space of a single evening – but I hope Kuang’s speculative novels are subtler. 3.5 stars.

I will cross-post this review to my blog and to Goodreads nearer the publication date.

R. F. Kuang is exceptional. A book worlds away from The Poppy War (and I assume Babel), Yellowface is an incredible work. I'm convinced there is no genre she could not write a 5* novel in.

It's immensely readable and jaw-droppingly brilliant. Kuang's writing is succinct and effortless, and I inhaled the book in 2 sittings. I try to avoid works with main characters I dislike, but June was such a despicable lead I couldn't look away - the entire book is a crash in slow-motion, that grips the entire way through.

Two Authors, One Manuscript..
Athena Liu - the current darling of the literary world - dies by freak accident. June (Juniper) Hayward - not the darling of the literary world - watches on, unable to save her friend. Two authors, one manuscript burning a hole in June’s bag. June’s decision to work on, finalise and eventually publish Athena’s unfinished manuscript is the catalyst that sparks a catalogue of unforeseeable (at least to June) events. A rip roaring satire, tearing shreds into the publishing world of today, burning everything in it’s path. It has to be said that it’s a fun ride, despite the weighty and not to be dismissed serious undercurrents. It reads like chicklit but it’s billed as literary fiction - this is no criticism but rather it exemplifies the ease of the tale, the formation of its’ unforgettable and credible cast of characters, the sharp humour and the deliciously devious plotline and of a story that will run full circle again and again and again. Distinctions may well be inevitably drawn with Yellow Face from David Henry Hwang and not only in title. The irony is not lost. A one sit read, quite impossible to put down.