This book has been everywhere lately and I’ve seen lots of good reviews but it’s contemporary literary fiction which is not usually my kind of thing so I didn’t pick it up. When a friend recommended it and offered to lend it to me, I decided I would. Never turn down a free book!

Yellowface by Rebecca F. Kuang is the story of how a white author, June, steals a manuscript from her very successful Asian-American author friend Athena – on the night the friend dies. She takes a first draft of Athena’s next book and develops it and then it gets picked up by her publishers. It’s a success, much more so than her previous books. The publishers editing team supports her with the rewrites. I quite enjoyed the portrayal of how the edits suggested by the editor made the text more problematic – nuance and complexity being removed, foregrounding of white saviour characters – and how June is oblivious to the impact on the story. She’s more concerned with not being found out and being a ‘good’ author.

I also enjoyed the portrayal of the internet storm in a tea cup that develops around claims that June is claiming to be Asian when she’s not, through an ambiguous name change and author photo, and has plagiarized someone else’s work. It fizzles out and doesn’t matter much in the end, by June is thrown into depths of paranoia and guilt. But clueless and unself-aware as she is, June plows on and does it again. Under pressure to produce another book, June rifles through Athena’s notebooks and picks a short paragraph to flesh out into a novel. Unluckily for her, Athena developed this paragraph in writing workshop and the tutor remembers. June is also being haunted online by someone using Athena’s social media account, which adds a pleasing touch of mystery.

I liked it a lot. Enough to buy another of Rebecca Kuang’s books. It is perhaps not as deep and rigorous a critique of the publishing industry as it could be, and is not that literary after all (probably why I liked it), and belongs in that ‘trashy’ novel phase I’m having. It was a fun, easy read which was well-written and thought-provoking in places.

There is an interesting review of the book by @withCindy which I watched. It pulls out the complete lack of analysis around wealth and privilege that impacts success for all people that could have made this book more hard-hitting. I think the review is really on-point and worth watching. Yellowface is still a fun read.