Hey Bibliofriends!

This week’s Biblioshelf Musings are about Yellowface by R.F. Kuang. I remember reading Babel as soon as it was released, and although the story wasn’t quite my usual vibe, it was incredibly clear that R.F. Kuang was a master at depicting important messages about people and their judgements and interactions with one another into her narratives. Yellowface was no exception to this and packed an incredible punch right from the first chapter! Read on to find out more in my spoiler-free review!

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Synopsis (from Goodreads)

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When Athena dies in a freak accident, June steals her unpublished manuscript and publishes it as her own under the ambiguous name Juniper Song.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

With its totally immersive first-person voice, Yellowface grapples with questions of diversity, racism, and cultural appropriation, as well as the terrifying alienation of social media. R.F. Kuang’s novel is timely, razor-sharp, and eminently readable.

My Musings

Wow, oh wow did Yellowface pique my curisoities with every single chapter! After the historical academia tones from Babel, this contemporary, memoir-like tale was so incredibly refreshing! Through its portrayal of the publishing industry, this book has everything – drama, twists and turns, an unpredictable main character, comedy and sinisterness – yet at its heart it tells the story of a writer and the true nature of the person that lies underneath that career-driven persona. This book is so witty and intelligently crafted that it blew my mind and made me reevaluate my own perspectives.

June/Juniper is a spectacularly written character! I didn’t know whether to sympathise with her, defend her, champion her or just completely abandon her. She is so morally grey, that the twists and turns in this story have your feelings towards her shift more rapidly than waves in a storm. There are obviously moments within this plot where you just want to point blank question her actions and her motives – I mean, what did she think would happen after plagiarising someone else’s story? But then, the treatment of her afterwards… some of it is wholly unjustified and wrong. Here is Kuang again making a point that some people have to go through this treatment and these accusations from the outside world every single day – and not all of them are deserved or come from a place of actual facts and knowledge. [Take the recent reactions to the Fairyloot special editions of the Throne of Glass series into account and you’ll see this first hand.]

The depiction of the publishing industry is a strong one with heroes and villains on both sides. I really enjoyed reading the viewpoints and flip-flopping around diversity – is it right to have someone who isn’t Chinese writing about Chinese Labour Corps? Is it right to try and disguise the heritage of the person writing the book to make people think that it has been written by a person with Chinese ancestry? Does it matter about a person’s ethnicity if they have done the appropriate, in-depth research…? At what point does cultural appropriation become a gatekeeper for someone’s voice or story? Where is the line in the sand between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation…? This entire story makes you question your own views about real-world issues and think about what you stand for. And it’s purely Kuang’s clever writing that has done that.

Throughout my reading, some parts of this novel felt like fictionalised accounts of Kuang’s own journey through the publishing industry (without the manuscript stealing obviously!). There were times I had to check myself with a reminder that this is not an autobiography (and hope that Kuang’s experience’s were far better than Juniper’s!). The stark parallel stuck out in my mind that I was reading about the publication of a novel within a novel which had likely had to go through an incredibly similar process – almost like the play within a play in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It really hit the ‘nerd-level coolness’ spot in my bookish heart!

Although Kuang is hitting weighty themes head-on by tackling racism, diversity, cultural appropriation, the darkside of social media etc, it didn’t leave this overwhelming sense of doom and gloom or preachiness in its wake. Yellowface does not stand on a grandiose soapbox blaring its message out to you, until you wholeheartedly accept it whether you wanted to or not. Yellowface gently guides you and opens your eyes to all of these difficult topics. It encourages you to truly think about what elements are right or wrong in each of Juniper’s situations, or whether such a reaction can be entirely black or white, rather than a shade of grey somewhere in-between.

If I had just one word to sum up this book, it would be CLEVER. This is an exceptionally astute piece of writing which manages to provide the humour and escapism that we seek in a fiction story, yet balance it with an incredibly thought-provoking message and outlook which will resonate with you long after closing that final page.

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Have you read Yellowface or is it on your TBR list? As always, drop me a comment to chat!

T xx

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