Yellowface has to be on par with Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow as one of the worst books I have ever read.
Kuang goes for the unreliable narrator by making the first-person voice of the novel the most unlikable, inhumane person ever. Kuang herself says in the epilogue that Yellowface is a story about loneliness in the internet age. It is not. It is about a whingy narcissist who believes that the world deserves to give her fame money and power because of her lack of artistic talent. Juniper Song is an unlikeable, deplorable cretin of a human whos actions can only be described as manic at best, and psychopathic at worst.
Yellowface details Juniper Song plagiarizing a novel from her `close friend’ Athena Liu. The “yellowface”, comes from the impersonation of Juniper as Chinese-American Athena. Kuang goes to great lengths to detail that on the titular book The Last Front the publishers change Juniper Hayward’s name to Juniper Song and don’t place an author photo so that it is more easily digestible as a book from a minority. Kuang also deeply details the envious thoughts of Juniper on the state of minority publishing. This book, does not have a author photo, and the author’s name is concatenated to R. F. Kuang to sound more ethnic. Kuang believes this is an artistic and amazingly subversive parallel to the themes in the novel. It is not. For me this is a deeply flawed metaphor. When being satirical, you are still doing the thing you hate.
There are lines of dialog in this book which are awful. The one that comes to mind is ‘I’ve smelt her [Athena’s] G-string stains’. This is not an amazing edgy line about intimate knowledge of someone, it is a disgusting line that sticks out like a sore thumb.
The titular Juniper Song is an a terribly unlikable character and throughout the entire story I do not feel sorry for her. There is no deep exploration into plagiarism or identity theft or social media. It is all surface level slop.
This is the second BookTok book I’ve been recommended and read. It is 2/2 in completely awful literature I wouldn’t show my children. It shows me BookTok is filled with completely illiterate, self-deprecating losers. DO NOT READ.