Name: Yellowface
Rating: 5 (2 reviews)
Author: R. F Kuang

About this book

Summary
Book Club Questions

Book Summary

White lies. Dark humor. Deadly consequences… Bestselling sensation Juniper Song is not who she says she is, she didn't write the book she claims she wrote, and she is most certainly not Asian American—in this chilling and hilariously cutting novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author R. F. Kuang.

Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. But Athena's a literary darling. June Hayward is literally nobody. Who wants stories about basic white girls, June thinks.

So when June witnesses Athena's death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse: she steals Athena's just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers during World War I.

So what if June edits Athena's novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? Doesn't this piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller? That's what June claims, and the New York Times bestseller list seems to agree.

But June can't get away from Athena's shadow, and emerging evidence threatens to bring June's (stolen) success down around her. As June races to protect her secret, she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.

With its totally immersive first-person voice, Yellowface grapples with questions of diversity, racism, and cultural appropriation, as well as the terrifying alienation of social media. R.F. Kuang's novel is timely, razor-sharp, and eminently readable.

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

Roland Barthes published the essay "The Death of the Author" in 1967 on whether the author's identity and biography are relevant to the meaning of a text. What do you take the "death of the author" to mean? Do you agree? How much does the identity and biography of the author affect how you interpret a text, if at all? Does it change things if the author is still living? If they died over a century ago?
June feels betrayed by Athena for writing a story about a traumatic experience she suffered during college. Do you think what Athena did was wrong? Robert Kolker's 2021 piece "Who is the Bad Art Friend?" also raised questions about whether it is ethical to publish fiction drawn explicitly from someone else's life. What ...

Media Reviews

"Excellent satire from Kuang...This is not to be missed." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Her magnificent novel uses satire to shine a light on systemic racial discrimination and the truth that often hides behind the twisted narratives constructed by those in power." —Emily Park, Booklist (starred review)

"A quick, biting critique of the publishing industry." —Kirkus Reviews

"This unsettling and electrifying book piercingly addresses issues of cultural appropriation and racial identity." —Library Journal

"Yellowface is one of the most transfixing novels I've read in ages… Kuang boldly interrogates literary hot-button issues like privilege, appropriation, and authenticity, leaving it open for readers themselves to decide where to draw the line." —Zakiya Dalila Harris, New York Times bestselling author of The Other Black Girl

"Yellowface is a brittle, eviscerating read that affected me bodily. Kuang's oeuvre consistently finds new ways to expose and interrogate systems of power, in this case tackling the commodification and consumption of art with both swagger and sophistication. Yellowface really is THAT bitch." —Olivie Blake, New York Times Bestselling author of The Atlas Six

'A spiky, snarky, shady, smart, sinister take on white privilege' —Nikki May, author of Wahala

This information about Yellowface was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Reader Reviews

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Cathryn Conroy

A Can't-Put-It-Down Satirical Literary Thriller That Is Also an Uneasy, Stomach-Churning Read
This is a can't-put-it-down satirical literary thriller that is also an uneasy, stomach-churning read that left me twitchy and nervous, but anxious to keep turning those pages. This book should come with a bottle of aspirin.

Written by R.F. Kuang, this is the story of Juniper Song Hayward. She is in her late 20s, a graduate of Yale University, and a published novelist. But her mediocre debut novel hit the dustbins almost before it was released. Living in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., Junie's only friend is fellow novelist and Yalie Athena Liu. It's a friendship fraught with angst, intense envy, and maybe a bit of hatred. Athena is wildly successful with multiple bestselling novels, scads of literary awards, and a stuffed-full bank account. She is living the dream of all novelists. Yes, she is pretentious and devious, but for some reason Athena and Junie still meet for drinks and chats.

The book opens with the two of them celebrating Athena's new Netflix deal, imbibing adult beverages on the rooftop of a pricey Georgetown bar. They go back to Athena's gorgeous Dupont Circle apartment and continue talking. They get hungry. They make pancakes. And Athena chokes…and dies. (This is not a spoiler; it's the entire basis on which the book's plot is built.) Junie then does something shocking: She steals Athena's latest manuscript about the 140,000 men in the Chinese Labour Corps who were forced to work for the British Army on the battlefields of Europe during World War I. The novel is still a very rough first draft, and June edits it—polishing the words, filling in the blanks, excising parts, adding more. She then passes it off as entirely her own work. It's a blockbuster—a bestseller beyond June's dreams of anything she could have written. Her life changes—drastically.

Will she be caught? The façade begins to crumble but Junie—now known as Juniper Song—must defend her work. She is White; Athena was Asian American. There is so much going on here from plagiarism to racism, from the overwrought power of social media to the despicable effects of cancel culture. After all, who gets to write the stories? Are we only allowed to write about what we intimately know? Can a Black novelist create a White protagonist?

I wonder how R.F. Kuang did it. Juniper is not a likeable person; it's difficult to be on her side knowing what she did. But somehow, I felt supportive of her. That's writing skill.

The ending? It's just as twitchy, nerve-wracking, and stomach-churning as the rest of the book. (Where is that aspirin?)

Bonus: As a reader, if you ever wondered the process authors go through to publish a book and then promote it, all the information is here. It's a fascinating, deep (deep!) dive into the publishing industry. In a word, it's brutal.

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Rebecca F. Kuang is a Marshall Scholar, Chinese-English translator, and the Astounding Award-winning and the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Award nominated author of the Poppy War trilogy and the forthcoming Babel. Her work has won the Crawford Award and the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel. She has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford; she is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale.

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