This book is my first 5 star read of 2023. The author does a great job exposing and explaining the dark face of publishing. The main character is so sure of their actions, especially as they have people who look exactly like them in piblishing supporting everything they do, even when there are BIPOC voices screaming at them from outside. This book makes me want to continue reading everything they put out! They can do it all!

I loved this book. I sometimes struggle with getting through books with unlikeable or unreliable narrators, but I couldn't put Yellowface down. I think it was because Kuang didn't ask me to like the narrator despite her flaws. She was the villain. It was very well written and unlike any other book I've read. As a book lover, I enjoyed getting to take a peek behind the curtain of publishing. Something that I appreciated about this novel is that there are times when the narrator says something ignorant, but Kuang doesn't always spoon feed her points to her readers. If you don't know much about the AAIP communities she's referring to, you might miss some of the narrators ignorance or note it but need to confront your own ignorance and do some research if you want to better understand some jokes that you're not in on. That said, most of the time the narrator's flaws and mistakes are obvious and they crescendo into a dramatic ending that ultimately concludes with the privileged white narrator's plans for a comeback, which I found to be an excellent way to point out the fallacy of "cancel culture".

June is the narrator I love to hate. I couldn’t help but wonder if this is how TJR thinks. June’s ramblings contained a never ending stream of bubbling doubt carefully laid over with delicate, deliberate lies to assuage her guilt. It was painful to read at times - June uses overt racism like a sick narrative quirk. It was easy to hate June. But her vitriol was addicting. I couldn’t put this book down and devoured every word. RF Kuang has woven a web of words to ensnare her audience… and make them wonder WHY they ate this book up. I want June out of my head like she wants Athena out of hers. Ew. Five Stars.

Thanks to NetGalley and William Morrow for the digital ARC.

Thank you to HarperCollins for sending me an advanced readers copy of Yellowface in exchange for an honest review.

Where do I even begin? This book is BRILLIANT. It's frustrating and unnerving and beautiful. Through June and Athena, R.F. Kuang creates a novel that critiques and questions the publishing industry at large as well as white authors, editors, literary agents, and online book spaces. She also has sub-themes of being of the diaspora and what that means for storytelling.

What I love about this is the complexity and nuance that she brings to this story, not with June but with Athena. Athena is an interest character because she's not the "perfect victim". She has unlikeable traits and acts questionably. She's complicated and her complexity calls on readers to reflect on their own moral superiority and who they believe is deserving of justice.

What's the most unnerving about this, however, is June's delusions. The story is told from June's POV and her delusions at times become that of the readers. June is committed to her delusional victimhood and acts in horrifying ways to maintain, all the way until the final pages of the book.

This will frustrate you. It will unnerve you. It will stick with you long after you've read the last page. I can't wait to see what R.F. Kuang produces next because there is truly nothing she can't do.

I really enjoy Kuang's writing, and I feel like she is continuously pushing herself to branch out in new directions. I definitely enjoyed what I read of Yellowface, though I don't think it's going to be for everyone. You can really feel the narrator trying to justify her actions and see how when people keep lying to themselves enough, it seems like it becomes the truth. Definitely an interesting and worthwhile novel.

I recognize the irony of posting this review of an advanced copy of a much-hyped book that I was able to read on NetGalley, when the book is so critical of the publishing industry and the bookish internet world, including Goodreads. Nevertheless, here goes…

I was excited to read an advanced copy of Yellowface, after recently reading and loving Babel. While this story is very different, the writing was still excellent — uncomfortable, challenging, clever, and sharp. As someone who’s pretty involved in the world of books but not as an author, this was a super juicy, dramatic read that I flew through in one sitting. I’ll avoid spoilers here, but that ending!!!! Very satisfying.

Thanks to Netgalley and The Borough Press for the opportunity to read and review this title prior to publication. Babel was one of my top books of 2022, so I was very excited to see Kuang was already releasing a new title in 2023. This is a giant departure from Babel, a scathing look at the publishing industry as a whole, who gets to tell what stories, and the overwhelming influence of social media on who is deemed worthy of writing. I was impressed by this first-person narrative, and the author's POV as a white author becoming a racially ambiguous bestselling author was dizzying. June's actions were wrong, but Kuang made the reader feel sympathy to some extent for her descent into madness. This book is set in a very specific time and place, and I will be curious to see the industry's response to this title. 4 stars.

Daring, ambitious, timely -- Rebecca Kuang grabs a live wire and doesn't let go. I don't know how I feel about the ending, if only because it throws a lot of stuff at the wall to see what sticks, but the first two-thirds are unimpeachable. She tackles the publishing industry, honesty, friendship, authenticity -- there's a ton of fight and fury here and no easy answers. Curious to see how both the publishing industry and the wider world get into the difficult stuff here; I imagine that they'll default, like the Twitter pile-ons of Junie, to fury and hot takes, but if there's an opportunity for consideration, this is a big one.

A Karen’s revenge tale. A sly commentary on appropriation vs. inspiration with whiteness as the constant leading character above all else. The protagonist is unaware how much she keeps exposing her own bias and prejudice to the reader. This was a savvy move on the part of the author. I found the climax to be a bit of a stretch and the writing lacked detail. I appreciated where the story ended up and think it made a salient, thought provoking point. A good book club pick.

I loved Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution so much that I immediately scooped up this ARC and was really excited to read it. Unfortunately, it's nothing at all like Babel.

The only consistency is the author's voice, which is definitely distinctive, but not necessarily in a good way. There's this ideological self-assuredness that comes through in both books, where the reader is always precisely aware of what the author believes (which is not even necessarily what the characters believe) and, by extension, what the author thinks the reader should believe. In Babel, I think this really works, given the scope of the story and the subject matter. There's a sense that the events and characters of the book have ramifications beyond what we see in the plot, and maybe even a kind of importance to that. In this book, almost the complete opposite feels true. We see one person's story with just enough context to keep the plot going and it all feels incredibly self-contained.

To continue the comparison between the two books, characterization was another area where this book felt much weaker overall. In Babel, we see Robin's past, his transformation from a naïve and idealistic child into a conflicted revolutionary, and his struggle along the way to find belonging and justice in a divided and entirely unfair world. In Yellowface, though, the main character's story feels like an exercise in misery. She is an incredibly unlikable narrator that the reader doesn't have the chance to see grow at all. She begins as a mediocre writer with a white inferiority complex and ends up as a mediocre writer with a white inferiority complex. Sure, she's an unlikable character, but even characters the reader is not meant to sympathize with should have some development, right? Or okay, if the point of the character is to highlight their arrested development, there should probably be at least one other character in the book that we know literally anything about, right?

I gave three (and a half) stars because this book is well-written, engaging, and I never thought about putting it down unfinished even when I cringed or rolled my eyes. (Let me tell you, I did not think I would cringe this hard at an R. F. Kuang book.) I think there's a great concept for a story here, but it just didn't come together in a satisfying way.

Or maybe it's just not for me. I told a friend that Babel felt like it had been written for me - a book focused on translation, written in an academic style, and advocating the fall of imperialism and colonialism?? That's pretty close to perfect for me. On the other hand, even if I might be relatively well-read, I'm not a writer or a creative of any sort, and the intricacies of the contemporary publishing world are not particularly interesting to me. So, take that as you will.

I will say that since Babel got five stars, meaning that it literally changed my life, I will dutifully read every new R. F. Kuang book even if I disliked this one. Fingers crossed the next one is a return to fantasy.

I received an ARC of this book from Netgalley.

*Received an e-ARC in exchange for an honest review"
R.F. Kaung is a brilliant author. She took the world by storm with The Poppy War and Babel and this one will take not only the non-book world by storm but also the book world. This one follows so close with publishing and what it's like to be an author who seems to be outshined by her "best friend". It's obvious that to a point the readers are supposed to feel bad for June because she didn't even get a paperback release but man is she annoying sometimes. She's obviously very out of touch, to the point where she didn't even want a sensitivity reader. Even if I wrote with representation from my cultures and my ethnicities, I'd still really want a sensitivity readers because what if I got something wrong or something wasn't represented correctly?
I think Kuang nails it with the nuances of publishing and satire of course. I think it's quite the book and that book t influencers will have interesting opinions given how closely it looks to publishing and the whole process.
Rating: 4.25 stars

my knee-jerk reaction after reading yellow face: the satire is executed sloppily; the twitter-centric plot seemed tacky; it gets so incredibly meta in an incredibly trite way; the prose seems unimaginative. why write dark, punch-in-the-face satire when you could write an obsession-laced story about possession, with satire simmering latently under a more compelling surface?

but while i was ruminating on all of this (pardon me for the tangent), i stumbled across rfk's tolkien lecture, delivered at oxford in 2022. i highly encourage giving it a watch, as she discusses some really interesting aspects of "the ideological novel," the relationship between content and form, and the question of what the novel is ultimately good for. it clarifies a lot of rfk's writing praxis and explains why her style might take such a straightforward, didactic approach. but what i'm curious about is how yellowface fits into her argument that criticism should mediate between content and form, as well as her assertion that art should, in her words, "seek truth, beauty, and goodness." while babel subverts the traditional Victorian bildungsroman, how does yellow face mobilize form in a similar vein? is it spinning postmodern confessional poetry on its head? is it somehow lampooning the litfic formula?

these discussions perhaps transcend the parameters of a goodreads review, but it gave me enough pause to question if i was thinking about the book through the wrong lens. yet from a consumer's standpoint (a.k.a. barring academic considerations), my gut feeling was to be, well, unimpressed. sure, the themes may be all very well and good, but if i can again parrot that tolkien lecture, themes themselves do not singularly make a good novel. in the end, it did come down to form—that is, the mechanics of the plot, formula of the satire, and distinctive, cartoonish style of its prose. nothing was landing the way i'd expected it to, perhaps because of the way the characters and plot were constructed in such a way that i felt like i was reading some sort of avant-garde textbook on the ills of the publishing industry. but if the goal of yellowface is primarily didactic, did it therefore accomplish its goal?

ultimately, i don't know. maybe i'll be able to produce a more definitive answer after sitting on my thoughts for awhile. what i can say is that the second half of the book felt contrived, and that, perhaps if given a different medium or style to work through, it would have been far more effective. yellowface is definitely a fascinating and instructive read (i'm thinking twice or maybe seven times before touching the publishing industry with a ten-foot pole), but to put it plainly, i just expected more from it.

📒YELLOWFACE by R.F. Kuang📒

📆Pub date: May 25, 2023
➡️Swipe for synopsis
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Read if you like:
📚 Books about books and writers
🥶Chilling reads with a bit of satire
📍Books set in the publishing industry

Yellowface was a chilling book about racism and cultural appropriation in the publishing industry, and now diverse voices are consistently erased by white society. This book centers on June, a white woman who steals her dead friend’s manuscript about Chinese laborers during World War I. There were so many angering plot points in Yellowface, with Juniper always finding ways to justify what she did.

It felt a little weird reading this book as a book reviewer because there is a lot of discussion on how readers and authors interact, and how Goodreads and social media reviews have so much influence on the book industry. There was soooo much information on the publishing industry and I loved that! I always love reading about writers and publishing professionals, and the addition of the chilling, satirical plot in Yellowface made it all the more excellent. There were a few things I didn’t enjoy, mostly that the ending was pretty vague and unsatisfying, and the chapters were very long. If you’ve read R.F. Kuang’s previous work, this is completely different. Overall I highly recommend this!

Thank you so much @netgalley and @williammorrowbooks for the gifted advanced copy of Yellowface🥰

The villain was the publishing industry and white supremacy all along! Also, June f’d around and found out, but still didn’t learn anything at all. Loved this book from Kuang. its a departure from her magical worlds, but still has her strong voice throughout. I can’t wait to see what she writes next.

I’d love to interview R.F. Kuang for my podcast Raise Your Words. Yellowface is an incredible book that includes twitter, drama, & a dark satire. If you loved Babel, you’ll love Yellowface!

As a fan of Kuang's previous books (Babel and the Poppy War trilogy) I was excited to read her newest endeavor.
And I'm still not sure how I feel about it. There was no one to root for, no happy ending to hope for.. and yet I couldn't stop reading.
It was undoubtedly well written. It flows seamlessly and I was immediately pulled into the toxic friendship dynamic between Athena and Juniper. Which did not end with Athena's sad, and peculiar death. (Choked on a pancake? Really?) But Athena's death allowed June/Juniper to steal her finished, but not yet edited manuscript, which in turn propels June's career into previously unknown heights.
Would Juniper get away with her theft? Would the guilt eventually eat away at her? (Though she seemed very good at justifying any flashes of guilt she felt until the very end) But also, how much more of her self justifying whining could I take?
Seeing everything solely from June's perspective was interesting. Her own insecurity, her envy, it made Athena seem like a cold, calculating villain, enjoying her pampered life in her penthouse. And June did her best to present Athena as a thief herself, albeit in little ways- stealing stories and experiences from everyone she met, to justify June's own larger theft. But this is June's story, and she is the hero, and every hero needs a counterpart. In Athena's life, June may have only been an old college friend she met up with on occasion., but to June, Athena was the epitome of what she herself should be.. if only... so we can only accept June's unreliable narration and wonder.

The ending felt a little abrupt- but also inevitable. June was taken down by her own earlier pettiness. And June's response to it, fit her to a T (for all that I despised her, she was very resilient!.).


Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing an copy in advance in exchange for an honest review.

Another incredible work by R.F Kuang, honestly I would buy and read anything she writes at this point. This book had it all, and even with the unlikeable narrator I was still riveted. I finished this book at 2 am and I have zero regrets on the sleep I missed.

After finishing this book I needed a couple of hours to process my thoughts into one cohesive review.
I think this book will be very divisive. People will either really love it or really hate it.
I loved this book. June is a character you love to hate and someone you want the absolute worst for. Warning, June doesn’t learn, theirs no growth, no acceptance, no understanding of how her actions have consequences.
I saw Junes character as a personification of the industry itself. It will defend itself and reimagine its motives even when confronted with its own truth. The industry as a whole will never take responsibility because the industry is not a person, it’s a million people upholding a million lies. June’s character shows the worst in an industry and it’s lack of remorse. When you put everything June has done side by side you think to yourself “this is crazy, no one would be this cruel” but if you look at her actions individually: people have always plagiarized other people work and gotten away with it, if not even celebrated for that work years later. People have pretended to be a certain ethnicity to sell themselves and their projects. People have said racist, homophobic, transphobic problematic things and still survive in the industry. People get cancelled and uncanceled, torn down then applauded for doing the bare minimum everyday. Junes character is all those things in one person. She represents everything this industry upholds and allows.
I loved Athena’s character, she was only shown through the eyes of others and were never quite sure what’s real or not. She was the most interesting and well rounded character and I always found myself second guessing anything that was said about her. We never got to know the true her only the imagined version of her. And I think that represents celebrity culture and this parasocial relationship we have with authors. Making judgments based on the one encounter we had or friend of a friend encounters. We don’t know Athena but I wish I did.
As I mentioned above I think some people won’t get this book, as we get into the second half it’s definitely more stream of consciousness then the structured story we were starting with. I think that shows how unhinged June is becoming by the end of her story. She was always a little disconnected from reality but by the end completely comes undone.
It was satirical and funny, and I found myself laughing out loud at certain points, cringing most of the time and wanting to throw my book at the wall at everything June thought or said.

Very meta, very harsh, and very smart. Yellowface absolutely eviscerates the publishing industry in a way that makes me want to give up on my author dreams and go hide in a corner--or better yet, delete Twitter and retreat to the woods. Despite not having much of an actual plot and a despicable narrator, this book was really hard to put down--the voice was so gripping (and honestly, it's super impressive that Kuang managed to even craft any sort of compelling plot out of the publishing timeline). Definitely worth a read!

RFK is so, so good at relentlessly letting characters face consequences. She's never going to pull a deus ex machina on you or write anything less than excruciating. I do think Yellowface should have been a writing exercise for her, but I was compelled the entire 2 hours it took me to slurp it. For better or worse, it's the eerie equivalent of reading booktwt (and bookstagram and book tumblr and la review of books and andrea long chu takedowns and and and and), and it scratches the itch of submerging yourself in hyperspecific online spectacle. It felt like a coke wormhole of YA author drama. Do I think she made the most subtlety scathing critique of racism in the publishing industry ever? Not particularly, but I don't care because she's so talented at representing the stupid intricacies of being online in 2023. Again, I'm in the position of defending RFK against accusations of a lack of nuance - I really think people get upset when her characters are too self-aware or (in this case) absurdly UNself-aware of racism. Yellowface isn't a mystery novel (it's probably at its weakest when it's trying to be); it's not bad that the ultimate critique is clear from the start. The devolution of June is more about evoking an affect of discomfort, rather than revealing some unexpected truth about racism. Delving even deeper, it's both brilliant and annoying that she self-parodies with Athena's lust for vicarious trauma, and I would have loved even more exploration of the relationship between her and June.