Yellowface

Contains spoilers.

This book was amazing read for me. I barely read anything fictional thats not got some element of fantasy or super powers. But I couldn’t stop myself from turning pages. Thoroughly enjoyed it and will be reading her other works.

This book however was gripping, the pacing of each sentence was masterful. It feels like it was written in its most condensed form without losing any meaning from the text.

The book was broken into many main themes as the story progressed. Basically, it shows a lonely character Juniper Song Hayward go through the envy, then stardom, then the fall because of her silly decisions.

She wants to be a great writer, but isn’t ever that good at creating her own ideas. She keeps trying to draw parallels between her own messed up situations and what Athena, the successful author of the book (in the novel), and herself.

There are significant moments in the book that make your insides curl. It shows someone not quite understanding what its like to be a person of colour, and how she continues to miss the mark, and unfortunately believes she’s in the right. There is one scene where she chats to her mentee, a young aspiring Asian author, about how because she is diverse she could write about anything and succeed.

Somehow the author was able to effectively show how bad June was at writing. June was racist too and couldn’t understand why, which was crazy to read.

It shows how her whole life changed when she got a great publishing team, who were able to effectively publicise her book and get it to the best sellers list. Though June’s success might also just be due to the foundations of the story she stole and edited.

Juniper struggles with her social media addiction, and her incessant need to be popular, also maybe her ego. These all warp any effective decision making she would ever be able to make, she fixes the momentary problems as they come up but doesn’t think about long-term consequences.

By the end of the book she is caught out on her lies, and even at the end, it finishes by June coming up with a delusional plan to flip the narrative on its head and go against the person who has video taped proof of her admitting her guilt.