WardenRed reviewed Yellowface by Rebecca F. Kuang
None
5 stars
Twitter scandals are like snowballs; the more people that see it, the more who feel it necessary to weigh in with their own opinions and agendas, creating an explosion of discourse branching off the instigating conversation.
This sure was a wild ride! I can’t quite remember the last time I read a story with a protagonist so thoroughly unlikable and, for the most part, had fun following it. Although at some point, the way Juniper reacted to yet another instance of her tower of lies crumbling underneath her did have me skimming more than reading for about a chapter, because I was absolutely dying from… secondhand embarrassment, I guess? Like, how can someone be so unapologetic and righteous in their mundane villainy, OMG. So yeah, June came very close to being too insufferable, and yet I was kept engaged by the promise of her getting her due in the end …
Twitter scandals are like snowballs; the more people that see it, the more who feel it necessary to weigh in with their own opinions and agendas, creating an explosion of discourse branching off the instigating conversation.
This sure was a wild ride! I can’t quite remember the last time I read a story with a protagonist so thoroughly unlikable and, for the most part, had fun following it. Although at some point, the way Juniper reacted to yet another instance of her tower of lies crumbling underneath her did have me skimming more than reading for about a chapter, because I was absolutely dying from… secondhand embarrassment, I guess? Like, how can someone be so unapologetic and righteous in their mundane villainy, OMG. So yeah, June came very close to being too insufferable, and yet I was kept engaged by the promise of her getting her due in the end combined with the occasional moments of sudden relatability when she talked about the non-plagiarism-related parts of the writing process.
The one thing I loved about the book is that the protagonist isn’t at all a mastermind. Her not-so-perfect crime is based on luck and privilege entirely. I was shaking my head at how little thought she put into the manuscript theft, how many very obvious loose threads that threatened to unravel the whole scheme she had to rush to clean up once she was made aware of them rather than trying to anticipate, well, anything. That approach coalesced really well with the overall theme.
It was also darkly entertaining to see how June kept rewriting the narrative in her own head, sometimes in a matter of a couple of paragraphs. “The evil Twitter people are saying that using these words in the book makes me racist? But they aren’t mine, they’re Athena’s! Now they’re saying they’ve compared this novel with Athena’s earlier work via some script and found a stunning amount of overlap in vocabularies? Fuck them, the words they found are all stuff like pronouns and ‘said,’ I put so much work into making it mine, it’s MY writing!“
Another darkly funny things was the depiction of the Twitter discourse—not just around June’s lies specifically, but all the mentions of other stuff springing up. I think I may have recognized the inspirations for some of those... Maybe I spent too much time following some of the writerly hashtag in the very same network, oops.
I did feel there could be some better lead-ups to that absolutely unhinged and very entertaining finale, and that certain aspects of the message could be delivered in a less heavy-handed way. But ultimately, I enjoyed this a lot.
