I was four books deep into the Red Rising Saga, brain fully fried from all the war and the backstabbing, when I decided I needed a break before the finale. Something short and contemporary, with zero space battles. That's when the blurb of Yellowface by R.F. Kuang got me: June Hayward, a struggling white author, steals the unpublished manuscript of her dead friend Athena Liu, a wildly successful Asian writer, and publishes it under the racially ambiguous name Juniper Song. How do you not pick that up?
So, did the book live up to the blurb? Yes and no.
My biggest struggle was June herself. She is just not likeable, and at no point did I catch myself rooting for her. I don't mind flawed characters (some of my favorite books are built on them), but June's flaws never felt layered or interesting to me, she just keeps making one terrible decision after another, and every single time she gets a chance to come clean or even pause for a second, she doubles down and lies more, digging herself into an even deeper hole, and honestly, watching that on loop got old for me pretty fast.
And we are stuck inside her head the entire book. The story is told only from her perspective, so we sit through every defensive, entitled justification she cooks up. I get that Kuang probably wanted it that way. But, it made the reading exhausting for me, because instead of a morally grey character I could wrestle with, I got someone stubbornly ignorant, and somewhere around the halfway mark I stopped caring what happened to her. Uff.
This hurts the book's bigger point too. The novel wants to critique racism and appropriation in publishing, but it leans so heavily on June's obviously awful choices that it ends up pointing at problems anyone can see, while the system that lets these situations happen in the first place stays mostly unexamined.
Which is a shame, because the core idea is genuinely great. Who gets to tell certain stories is a very real, very live debate in the literary world right now. But, in my opinion, the debate skips a bigger factor, which is who actually gets the opportunities and the marketing push and the recognition afterward. Marketing budgets, industry connections, one random viral BookTok video. That is what shapes success in publishing today, and talent is just one item on the list (probably the smallest one, if I'm being cynical). The book gestures at all of this and then never fully goes there.
Funnily enough, the premise feels even sharper now with AI writing tools everywhere. Readers keep calling out authors for publishing books, or big chunks of them, generated by AI, and the ethical question underneath is the same one Yellowface asks: can you take credit for work that isn't truly yours? The only difference is that June stole a manuscript instead of prompting a chatbot.
So, do I recommend Yellowface? A hesitant yes. It is a short, fast read, and the questions it raises about race, privilege, and authorship are genuinely worth your time, even with all my complaints above. But, if you are someone who needs a main character to root for, skip this one, because June will drive you up the wall.