Yellowface: The instant #1 Sunday Times bestseller and Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick from author R.F. Kuang

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There are books with characters that have issues, and issue books that have characters. This is the former, so it totally worked for me. it's now 2023. in short, the ending is less a bang, and more of a whimper. rfk rules out a geoff-style ending for june, someone who disappears quietly from public memory after the scandal and becomes old news. she's too attached to athena's image. this is the right choice--june is too much of a villain-protagonist to get an unearned, 'soft' ending at the end of this. but then the 'crash-and-burn' ending needed to be a lot more to be satisfying for me. we get hallucinations, suicidal ideation, her isolating herself from her support network, all of this building and building and building--and then it goes... Now Goodreads had a lovely (I'm being facetious) article up featuring Asian and Asian American books for this month. That banner is now gone. Scroll through the comments. The amount of white trolls that are offended that we have a month is atrocious. No, white people don't have a month. But people read your books all the time. I don't have to explain this any further, do I? It is AAPI month. Sometimes called AANHPI month. And yet no books on the list featured Pacific Islanders. I read How to Loiter in a Turf War, featuring Māori rep, on Carol's suggestion.

Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang | WHSmith

Bona fide stars’: Victoria De Angelis and Damiano David of Måneskin on stage at Lollapalooza, 2022. Photograph: Scott Legato/Getty Images And let’s take this a step further and look at how Kuang illustrated the danger that publishing has ultimately created with it’s use of terms like #ownvoices. Athena wasn’t ever allowed to write outside of trauma. She’s pigeonholed into only writing one thing. And honestly, I’m sure that happens more than we would like to believe. Authors who want to explore something outside of their “assigned” roles either get turned down or the marketing is trash. It delves deeper into the question of who is allowed to tell what story? Was Athena any better of a fit to tell the story of Chinese laborers of WWI than June? Is research enough to tell something outside of one’s lived experience? These are things to think about and something that we are confronted with every day in this community. Think about books like American Dirt and Memoirs of a Geisha.June was unhinged. The kind of unhinged that believes her own lies and thinks she is morally in the right. Girl took delulu to another level. 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 to the British and French war efforts during World War I. So even though I didn’t agree with all of Kuang’s satirical commentary in Yellowface (e.g., I think Asian Americans should be asked hard, critical questions about glorifying whiteness both in dating partners and in other areas of life), I respect that she seized a popular topic in the publishing industry and made a novel out of it. The exaggerated nature of satire doesn’t always lend itself to a deeper emotional connection with the characters or the story, though I don’t think a deep emotional connection is necessarily the point of this novel. Overall, while I don’t see this novel breaking into my top ten list at the end of this year, I found it an interesting read and one that may be fun to discuss. which was a big thing that irked me with tpw. people would make criticisms of rfk's narrative choices and plot points and the response would be ‘well, rin is an unreliable narrator!’ yes, but there is such thing as framing and context which are important things to consider when trying to figure out what an author actually is saying, intentionally or not. but anyways.) Is this book satire? Obviously and not quite so much. What I mean is, it’s clearly satire, but to an extent that these characters are not exact flesh and blood, but the issues discussed in this book are far from farcical. Most reviewers have noticed the central themes in Yellowface rearing their ugly head in the real world, especially in the past few years, so it is refreshing and exhilarating to read a fictional novel encompassing these issues in a way that only R.F. Kuang could create.

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang | Waterstones

I’ll be honest, I read this book in a single sitting. I could not look away, and Kuang’s writing sweeps you up in it’s conversational cadance. While I’ve enjoyed Kuang’s writing previously, Yellowface feels very polished and matured, the novel reading with the ease and eagerness of a tell-all memoir, which is the framing of the story. As a fictional memoir, it drops a lot of pop culture references to key into a specific time. Kuang’s choice of perspective through June—who rebrands at the request of her publisher as Juniper Song, Song being her middle-name but also nudges readers to think she may have Chinese heritage—is brilliant as it allows us to feel the floor-dropping-out discomfort of becoming the focus of internet rage as well as navigate a vigorous criticism of the publishing industry. Kuang is able to cover issues without moralizing, making the reader sift through alternating opinions that are likely to expose their own assumptions and discomforts, and we must always remember the telling is often guiding us away from judging her and towards everyone else. With a big confession at the center, June can manipulate the reader on smaller issues and in a way it becomes a rather metafictional approach to the way storytelling is just that: fictionalizing stories. Sustaining the fraud in the eye of the storm requires ever more manic deception – and self-deception. After all, didn’t Juniper simply midwife a far-from-ready draft that might otherwise never have seen daylight? And in the first place, hadn’t Athena once strip-mined sensitive details of Juniper’s personal life for an early short story? And it’s so hard for white writers to catch a break these days… But as evidence threatens June's stolen success, she will discover exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.I like to do my homework with films, especially Christopher Nolan’s films, as they so reward doing your homework. I read all the material that inspired Dunkirk before I saw it in 2017, and this time I had to read the Pulitzer prize-winning biography that inspired Oppenheimer. (My fiance and I also sat down to watch Tenet for the fourth time with graph paper and multicoloured pens so we could map out the various timelines, and I regret to admit that this was extremely fun.) American Prometheus adds rich context to many of the chance encounters, interpersonal relationships and courtroom drama scenes in Oppenheimer. 2. Fiction But when I read Babel: An Arcane History for the first time last year, I was absolutely floored. It's not the kind of book an author can write for their debut. Such a glaring take on anticolonialism was hated by many. You know who. Not that I need to look at myself even more harshly than I already do, but it made me do that. it was very heavy-handed, and pretty self-indulgent, but i love three things in this life and those are mean girls, and b*tching with my friends, and books, and this was all three of them in one.