"Feels bad, doesn't it?"..."Watching someone warp your image and tell your story however they choose, knowing you have no power to stop it? No voice?"
Yellowface is the first R.F. Kuang book I've read and when I finished it, I actually just sat there for a while mulling it all over.
Literary darling Athena Liu, is celebrating a TV deal with Netflix with her "friend" June Hayward. Sadly June is not experiencing even a fraction of the success Athena is.
Then June watches Athena choke to death on a pancake...and steals her unpublished finished manuscript. (This isn't a spoiler it's in the blurb and happens in Chapter One so stay with me here).And this is all the introduction to this dark satire you need!
June edits the stolen manuscript which is a novel about the unsung contributions and experiences of the Chinese Labour Corps recruited by the British Army during World War I. She a white woman who knows nothing of this history then sends it to her agent passing it off as her own work, and begins the journey to whirlwind success.
Let's be clear this is a satirical novel filled with despicable characters who show just how dangerous jealous and envious people can be. June Hayward is a narcissistic, racist, thief and so many other things but we come to learn Athena isn't so squeaky clean either.
There's a lot going on here. It raises many questions about the relationship between authors, agents publishers and readers. Also authorship itself, the nuances of storytelling, exploration vs lived experience, and the process of watering down ideas to make a novel more marketable under the guise of the editorial process.
Arguably the manipulation of author identity (name changing, creative bio editing etc), and the pigeonholing of authors into certain genres were two aspects only briefly touched upon. There's so much here already but I would have like more on this.
I suppose the downside to raising so many of these questions at once is that this commentary sometimes drew away from the relationships between characters which is why...SPOILER ALERT⚠️
...I think it doesn't quite come to any conclusion. The change of trajectory for Candace's character leaves you with the 'publishing is a dog eats dog world' feeling which maybe wasn't necessary as this had already been evidenced by previous events.
June never gets her comeuppance and we get a fade to black at two of the most crucial and interesting points !!! This makes it feel like there isn't really an ending, whereas I would have liked to have seen the immediate aftermath of the staircase confrontation, and to witness June having those very awkward conversations with Brett and Danielle. For it to end nowhere almost undermines the rest of the novel by leaving you with the feeling of...so what now?
Yellowface is an ambitious novel that provides a lot of food for thought. I enjoyed the commentary on the publishing industry, whose stories are told, how and by whom, and the bold, disruptive characters but it lost a few points for me due to the slightly jumbled feel at times and the ending.
⭐️⭐️⭐️💫
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