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 I’ll be reading her other works.

This book 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. It jumped from plot to plot, and I like that it didn’t waffle on about unessesary bits.

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. I wonder if she might have done better as an editor of other peoples works (though envy and her mean inner voice probably wouldn’t have helped her case).

There are significant moments in the book that make your insides curl. Basically, June was racist and couldn’t understand why. We see her struggling to understand what its like to be a person of colour, and how she continues to miss the mark, and unfortunately believes in her mind that she’s in the right. There is one scene where she chats to her mentee, a young aspiring Asian author and says something along the lines of: “don’t worry, you’ll be fine. You could write anything, you’re diverse and publishers eat that up!”.

R.F.Kuang showed June as a bad writer by showing us the bad decisions she made while writing, especially the parts June decided to cut out.

I enjoyed seeing the difference between having a star publishing team vs an independant agent who doesn’t have the resources to support a writer. I wonder how much of this is true in the real world? Marketing is such a skill, and if you aren’t able to get your book, product, or tech in front of people then I doubt they’ll use it.

June’s whole life changed when she got a great publishing team. They were able to publicise her book and get out to the best sellers list. They had connections, and methods, and a team of publicists to help her. Though June’s success is probably due to the foundations of the story she stole.

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.