I picked up Yellowface because I’d heard quite a few people sing its praises and because all of the bookish stars aligned (I needed to pick up a book and it was on my “realistic TBR” and the audiobook became available). It’s an interesting book that discusses the topic of the affects of social media on authors but I’m not sure it quite does enough.
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Yellowface tells she story of how one day unsuccessful author June Haywood’s friend and incredibly successful author Athena Liu dies whilst they’re having what seems a fantastic night together at her nice apartment. June then takes one of Athena’s manuscripts for an upcoming book she has and decides to use it to write her own book and becomes a success from it. Then when ghosts start coming out of the woodwork claiming they know what she did, things get a bit dark and odd.
Yellowface plot – 3.75/5
I like to think I know when things are taking the mick out of something and I like to think I can take a joke, but having finished this and then hearing people say it was supposed to be satirical, I feel like I completely missed the point.
My opinion before hearing this was that the plot was quite interesting because we get to see behind the scenes of what it would be like to be a semi-successful author receiving hate on social media. But then that’s about as far as my interest went – outside of that I was waiting for something more to happen.
In hindsight, I think I expected more because R.F Kuang’s other books have all included quite original and fantasy-focused ideas, so when this plot focused on one character, was quite short, set in the modern day and included no fantasy elements whatsoever, I was a little underwhelmed.
Additionally it all felt a little mundane – there wasn’t any thriller moments and there weren’t any particular plot points that had me racing to see what else was coming.
Yellowface characters – 3.75/5
Our main character in Yellowface, June Haywood (or Juniper Song later on) is fine as a character. She’s the one through whom we read the entire book and the events that play out. She’s got enough of a personality to lead us through the story but at no point did I find myself particularly enjoying reading from her point of view.
We meet other people in the publishing industry throughout the book and, in a similar vein, I wasn’t that bothered about these either. No one stood out to me as somebody who I could cling on to and look forward to reading about.
It felt like every character in Yellowface had their roles and they spoke the default words and played those characters perfectly but were never allowed to deviate into any form of personality or humour.
Yellowface final rating – 3.75/5
I’ve since heard Yellowface was intended to be satirical but I just read the book finding it all a little dull. I personally enjoyed the idea of seeing the author’s side of things when social media starts to strike back but the rest of it was all a little underwhelming. There were no big twists, the pacing was consistently monotonous and the characters didn’t make up for anything at all either, filling cookie-cutter roles in the publishing industry. Maybe i’d have enjoyed it more knowing it was all supposed to be a bit of an ironic look on race in the publishing industry (something I have absolutely no awareness of).
