Imagine you and your best buddy start your life with the same career. You both go to the same college, study in the same program and aim to have the same career. But after graduation, your best friend ends up signing a deal with a big publishing house, and your work sees no light of the day.
The jealousy brewing in you is natural. You watch your friend excel and witness her climbing the success ladder while she enjoys book sales and author events, basking in the glory of fame you always wanted, you don’t get any chance. You’ll be happy to some extent, but at some point, you’d like to steal that away. That’s the bitter truth of human nature.
This is not your ordinary “feel good” story but an insight into one’s mind and how brutally it works when it comes to grappling for success—when you’re really desperate for something. It is a sharp, incisive exploration of race, identity, and the ethics of storytelling in the modern publishing world. This provocative, genre-blurring novel brilliantly critiques the industry’s commodification of diverse voices and raises a question: must you go through the trauma to write that trauma?
“This industry is built on silencing us, stomping us into the ground, and hurling money at white people to produce racist stereotypes of us.”
A lot of us write something based on enormous research despite not being part of it. If I am not indigenous, can I not write historical indigenous stories based on my research? Can a non-Muslim writer not write a Muslim story?
Meet our protagonist, June Hayward, the novel’s white, self-absorbed narrator. She is both frustratingly unlikeable and oddly relatable. Her jealousy of her Asian-American friend, Athena Liu, is quite relatable.
When June witnesses her friend Athena choking to death, she impulsively decides to steal her unpublished manuscript and make it her own. The writer’s intimate knowledge of publishing trends and the insider’s perspective on the narrative are commendable. From the power dynamics of editors and agents to the pressures of social media outrage, this is something we all authors can relate. We, authors, often ask this question: is our work sellable? We see its credibility based on its sales and not the quality of work.
“Social media is such a tiny, insular space. Once you close your screen, no one gives a fuck.”
I am not here supporting her theft; what should be worth reflecting on here is her criticism towards her publishing something that is not culturally rooted in her.
Yellowface by R.F. Kuang is a compelling page-turner where the tension steadily builds as June’s theft spirals out of control, forcing her to confront not only the consequences of her actions but also her own insecurities and biases. The psychological unravelling of the protagonist keeps the readers hooked till the last page.
The story holds up a mirror to its readers, challenging them to consider their own complicity in systems of privilege.
It makes us (writers) ask: who gets to tell the story?
**FIVE STARS!