Book Review | Yellowface

Hello, and welcome to my book review for Yellowface by Rebecca Kuang. This is a very popular and hyped literary thriller of sorts, with a very close focus on the book industry. Read on to hear my thoughts!

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

White lies…

When Athena dies in a freak accident, June steals her unpublished manuscript and publishes it as her own under the ambiguous name Juniper Song.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 will discover exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.

Deadly consequences…

What happens next is entirely everyone else’s fault. -Waterstones

Huge thank you to Harper Collins and NetGalley for the eARC copy of Yellowface.

This is one of the most hyped novels of the year, possibly you’ve seen it on the internet?!? It’s had a huge marketing budget behind it, it’s been really hard to miss! I was very excited to read it and see what all the fuss is about. As someone who works in the book industry I was really interested to see what the author has chosen to do with her novel.

In this novel we follow June, a young novelist whose debut novel was published to very little critical acclaim or fanfare. When she witnesses her friend Athena, bestselling young author and literary darling, die, she decides to steal her finished manuscript and publish it as her own.

Firstly I want to share that there are 0 likeable characters in this novel. I am someone who really struggles to connect with a novel if I don’t like any of the characters, so immediately I found myself pretty uninterested. We spend the whole time in June’s head, and it’s not a particularly nice place to be! She is exhausting. So self-interested and obsessed, I found it quite difficult to power through.

A lot has been said online and in reviews about June as an unreliable narrator, I’m not going to bother repeating any of the discourse except to highlight it. As readers, everything June tells us we are sceptical of, and because the novel is told entirely from her perspective, it does add another bit of distance between us and the story itself.

This novel takes a long hard look at book twitter and other online spaces. At first I really enjoyed this introspective look at somewhere that authors and other bookish people come together, but sadly it became rather repetitive. What at first was a succinct point about the pitfalls of being chronically online soon became a very tired and overused message that the novel began to really belabour. It really lost its impact! The main character and the book itself is chronically online (aren’t we all!) and I think this was rather to its detriment. It becomes to self aware, and meta, a book within a book making a very laboured point. Instead of being a clever reflection on publishing and the book industry and the pitfalls of being online, it just spent to much time trying to be clever.

None of the themes in this novel are subtle, which disappointed me. Kuang’s previous book Babel was a brilliant novel with subtle imagery and themes and I guess I was expecting more of the same. Instead Kuang chose to really labour the themes which I wasn’t so keen on. I don’t really like being lectured and this one did feel a smidge lecture-ish!

Without spoiling the ending for anyone, I was so disappointed! The novel seems to fizzle out a bit, without any real ending or conclusion.

Overall I was a little disappointed by Yellowface. I went in with high expectations because I love Kuang’s other novels, but this one didn’t do it for me!

Thank you for reading my book review of Yellowface by R.F. Kuang. Thank you HarperCollins for the eARC.

Buy Yellowface from Waterstones or Bookshop.org

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