I feel like the author wanted to say to spark conversation with this book regarding the publishing industry, diversity initiatives, and cancel culture, but because the protagonist is very unhinged, it doesn’t allow for much engagement through the protagonist or chances for readers to really explore
totally agree!! i just feel it lacked a lot of nuance which could have made it so much better in my opinion. it sorta felt… too obvious? kuang’s commentary felt a bit too blatant for a fictional satire and i think if she wished to go in that direction an essay would have been better.
So true what you said about her psyche not being fleshed out to justify her actions from her perspective!! There’s a really disappointing sense of flatness and even laziness that stems from knowing the author is just using everyone as a mouthpiece
love how eloquent you were in your criticism of this! i haven't read yellowface yet, i have read the poppy war series and babel. i think what you're saying really resonates with my experience of reading babel specifically - there's not a lot of subtlety to the themes, it's all a bit heavy-handed, you can almost feel r f kuang watching over your shoulder as you read and it stops you from really immersing yourself in the book. in babel's case, it felt more like she wanted to lay out all of her opinions and research rather than take the reader on a journey
So appreciate your thoughts on this one! I had a fun time reading it bc I was like what a silly fun thriller, and then the longer I've thought about it the more conflicted I felt realizing it was intended as a literary satire. To me it felt like a campy thriller with a bookish bent bc of how heavy handed it was, but the longer I think about what it was trying to do, the less I feel like it achieved it. Looking forward to the vlog!
i totally agree with everything you said. and it seems like after 4 books, the author hasn’t really improved that much. the lack of character depth, the lack of nuance in her themes have been present from the beginning. funnily enough, i actually enjoyed the poppy war the most as it was the first adult asian inspired fantasy book i’ve read, but as time went on and as i read more books, i just realized how mediocre the series was. i still consider it the best reading experience i’ve had among all her books. babel could have been great but again, i learned nothing new about race and colonialism. it makes me wonder who her target audience is supposed to be. babel was just 500+ pages of the author screaming colonialism bad. girlie, i know! at one point it got sp bad that i could actually hear the author’s voice screaming at me while reading the dialogue
Love the review! My biggest quip with this story is similar to a lot pf others in that its just so surface level, doesnt go very deep. I wish the racism was done in a more layered way, the type that you dont quite realize how messed up it is until you reread it or do more reflecting. Its like yup we get it shes complaining about dumplings and is jealous, we have read this ten other times now. Like you mentioned, i could just go on twitter or Instagram comments and get the same type of discourse. June was so unlikable to the point that she was boring and predictable.
I think the assault is meant meant to also add to the pattern of Athena being a “thief” of experience. Thus making June’s thievery being a justified on a personal level - of course it’s unjustified but June lives from one worked through rationalisation to the next. I quite liked how June bounced between doing a bad thing, and then criticising another doing the same bad thing. So I think a principle idea is about a person who digs more and more into justification even if the inconsistency becomes parody. I think there’s a kind of rude reality in this. I’m not sure the Dolezal link is quite apt. June explicitly is ambiguous and purposefully so but also does not ever claim to be Asian (there are two bits where she is asked about it at least and doesn’t pretend to be Asian it - the scene at the book club with the old man and the girl she mentors on zoom). I think while the writing might have an air of hackishness you can sort of justify it by the fact that June is a bit of a hack writer. She can only get published when she secretly robs a better writers work. My feeling is that the underlying point is that the industry is on some level inherently meritocratic. June as a white woman feels like she can never get published because of that but in fact she does get published to her most acclaim when her work is really someone else’s. Athena’s work isn’t published just because she’s the flavour of the month but because it passes the quality checks even when its author’s identity is obscured.
Your last comment might be how June thinks, but for the narrative to support it completely ignores the popular white authors on NYT best sellers and other lists whose books have bad or derivative works.
I really think your analysis in the first 2 paragraphs here is very observant of human nature. We will find a reason or justification when we want to find one, no matter how illogical or ridiculous. It's kinda funny because "Anti-racism" Theory demands we do this too. It presumes racism and finds it everywhere it seeks it out - openly admits so - regardless of what a stretch it might be to allege in a given instance...
I am also having simliar thoughts about this book. RFK seems like an interesting and complex person, though, so it's interesting to see her perspective on things in her books. I just think her conclusions are too simplistic...too black and white for my taste. And Om shanti Om! I love that movie!
Ooooo agreed w a lot of this. The satire just didn’t totally work imo bc it just seemed like things that actually happen but w caricature-like characters. I think saying it’s a SCATHING indictment of the industry did it a disservice bc it’s not surprising??
I feel you. I had really similar thoughts when I was reading Babel. I may have not been the target audience, but I also just don't feel like it was really an effective piece (in my opinion)! In all honesty, I think R.F Kuang might be more successful as a non-fiction writer. I can see she is passionate about certain subject matter, but for me she's not able to craft a proper narrative. I think the lack of nuance with the points she makes really gets to me too. And I also tend to prefer an author to let readers come to their own conclusions in a subtle, nuanced way. I feel that humans are complicated and complex beings, and her characters just never feel like real, actual people to me. It's all subjective and my own opinion, but yeah, don't think I will be picking anything else up from her 😅
I feel like I could've loved this if June was a good guy at the beginning, and her and Athena had a deep bond. Maybe just a bit of jealousy, but feeling guilty for it, something subtle and plausible in a healthy friendship. Then, perhaps she could've finished the book as a way of feeling close to Athena again and dealing with her grief. In this version, June would've had a roomate or someone who would've seen the manuscript hanging around and told her "Omg this has to get published!". She would've been VERY hesitant about it and only after her roomate insisted a lot, she would've submitted it to continue Athena's legacy. This to me, would be a story about a morally ambiguous person who is slowly lured into her darkest self. It would also explore racism; from a more realistic, nuanced and uncomfortable perspective.
Thank you so much for this honest review, I read it three weeks ago just bc it was popular and what I got was annoyance with the plot and characters. It was like Kuang was hammering to our heads that we should hate Juniper Sing, but then it's revealed that Athena Liu was also manipulative...and I was like, great, I don't have even one character to like, or even enjoy bc I adore good written villains.😅 This was Kuang's first book I've read. I'm trying to go through Babel now. I guess she isn't for me.🤷The only interesting part was reading ab the pub industry, but that's all. It felt like an essay more than a book 😅
The problem with Yellowface is that RF Kuang is a privileged woman, growing up in extreme wealth, who wrote a book that she thought was good that took off and made her a successful author. So she now thinks that publishing is a meritocracy for the same reason most successful people think they succeeded within a meritocracy: "it worked for me, therefore it must work for EVERYONE. The problem for other people must be that they're not working hard enough, or not good enough."Just embarrassing, child shit. So she isn't remotely equipped to satirize the publishing industry because she doesn't actually understand the problems in the publishing industry. She thinks it's a meritocracy where people who don't succeed are haters who lack either the talent or work ethic or both needed to succeed, failing to realize that unfortunately talent is not even the MOST important element, much less the only. (I always rely on the perfect "Stephen King's success vs Richard Bachman's lack of success" as a perfect example of how talent isn't the point, you need luck above all else. And of course, being rich affords you more swings, which creates more opportunities to be lucky.) June steals Athena's manuscript and *instantly* becomes successful because her manuscript is good, as if that's what it takes to succeed in publishing. Just an extremely silly notion that springs from RF Kuang's privilege.
I felt icky about this book. I couldn’t pin point why I was not impressed with the book, but your review is perfect. The character, the writing, the ending, the lack of depth, the tone and the style, the point of the book and how it feels like she is using it in a rush to voice her experience. This is exactly how I felt but you helped me verbalised it. I still enjoyed the book, but I was just not impressed…. I was expecting much more because how much people have hyped it up. And I was really disappointed. It would be a quick holiday by the pool type of read at best. I am no writer myself, but just comparing it to other books I have read….
The plot was already done in a way In Californication when Mia steals Hank Moody’s manuscript and claims it for her own… except the fall out of that was wayyyy better
I don’t think the Rachel Dolezal thing is a valid thing to compare. Rachel was identifying as black, June never identifies as anything other than white. It’s not the same kind of relationship to race at all, Yellowface is more about ownership of stories rather than adopting a new racial identity. Also, I don’t think June is meant to be a cartoon villain. She’s despicable in her perspective as a selfish and narrow white person and certainly horrible… but making her do more cartoonishly racist things would take her out of the realm of ‘I’m a victim/Karen type’ and would be a totally different story.
thank you for your comment! while june isn't explicitly claiming to be asian, she doesn't correct people and occupies spaces where people assume. i feel like the book straddles the line between satire and realism and that middling is ineffective, to me
my headcanon is that rf kuang wrote the one entitled self righteous white girl chapter in babel and then thought hmmmm i'm going to base a full novel on that, and then sat down to right yellowface. Also it's very funny to me that criticisms of Athena in the book (privileged, never actually lived in China just writing about it, bad Taiwanese representation) are apparently criticisms that rf kuang has actually received but put in the mouth of racist and unlikable characters (see withcindy's video on yellowface for details) i would still heavily recommend babel though - i thought yellowface was very mid (i read it first), but babel was really good. Although I do have to say when Babel starts to get really chaotic the writing does seem to get worse (which also makes sense to me since Yellowface is chaotic from the very start), and it gets a little heavy handed in places (i would fully expect white readers to feel like they're being beaten over the head with the point - not necessarily a bad thing), but I don't think it detracts too much from the book.
I read the Poppy War (book 1). Loved the beginning but not the end. I've avoided Babel because reading the reviews I don't think I'm gonna like it. So Yellowface is my favorite R.F KUANG book so far. To me this was a 4-star book until the end. The last chapter was way too unhinged for me. I dropped my rating to 3/3.5 stars. I agree with you that this did not feel like a satire at all. In fact, June's reactions seemed a lot like the reactions of white people irl whenever racism in the subject (in my experience). I also think there was nothing new to be told about racism. But can we blame the author here? In this day and age, is there really anything new that could be told about racism? I don't think so. I focused on how things were told in this book, and I liked the over-all message of it (not new either) : white people will be given the benefit of the doubt regardless of fault. Plus, the conscious realization June has at the end that she can use racism to her advantage, when throughout the book her actions don't necessarily seem consciously racist. I actually didn't see the rape element as something used to make us feel sympathy towards June. Personally, her relationship with her mother humanized her more than the rape. The book mentions that after her mother lost her husband, her mother lost herself in this model of the American successful widower archetype. It also gives hints that she always prefered June's sister over June. Personally, no complaints there for me. Since I write too, all the themes about writing were also well explored. The jealousy, the hustling, the self promo lol, the loneliness of the process, the fact that Bestsellers are chosen by publishers not readers- specially interesting because this is an author who has been publishing bestseller after best seller. I'm sure she's conscious this applies to her books as well. I've read better self published fantasy books than the poppy war. Anyways I liked all of this.
Terrific, insightful, engaging review - I agree YF was not a strongly profound book or nuanced, although I must say still reasonably entertaining, particularly by building up a degree of tension around the consequences of the main character’s actions.
I liked YF much more than you did. It succeeded in being funny without employing the kind of exaggeration you were looking for. I admired much about Babel, but was unconvinced by the characters. I don't think you d like it.
I read this in 1 day, it was *that* good. It's actually more about the horrors of social media and how it turns people into their worst versions of themselves. It just proves that twitter, reddit etc are just modern day equivalents of medieval town squares with mobs and pitchforks.
this was my first novel by rf kuang. i have not finished lol yellowface has a great premise but i agree the satire could have been stronger and i didn't like the writing. idk should i finish?!?! lol
It was an intense, good story but I came off feeling unsettled of people doing all sorts of illegal immoral things to get things, even when you are talented. In the end the book industry is exposed like any industry, someone is holding all the chips and it's sad when good authors don't get a deal. I love books and hope this industry is ever present just fair for everyone.
It was a mediocre book, the evil wasn't evil enough, the end was half baked, too fast and yep- the sexual assault was a half a** excuse to throw back shade, the missing mom... you hit it head on as far as I felt about it. It's a 2 star for me mostly for being childish. Lady Macbeth is shorter and a way more convincing expression of haunting remorse.
Yeah. I feel like that's definitely an issue with books like this. Lack of substance. I feel like, these days, you write a passably good enough book about racism and if it gets into the hands of powerful people who like it, it's a hit. Whether it really has anything to say about the subject or not.
Hello, late to the party, but just read it yesterday. I read it as a literary thriller with some satirical elements rather than any platonic ideal of satire, so I liked it well enough. It has been interesting to see a variety of takes on whether June is at all sympathetic. For me, it varied at different places in the novel. When she was clearly traumatized at the beginning and when she knew she was over her head, I felt for her not because I have been in those specific situations, but because I though Kuang did a good enough job evoking those feelings that I was along for the ride. I hope I've never been as awful as June was at the times I felt most disgust for her. Anyway, I didn't adore it but I think I liked it more that you did. I saw the point being about contemporary conversations on race, how they pay out and how white privilege is still very much a thing.
