Hello, bookworms!
Happy Wednesday, what are you currently reading? Has your reading year started out great? I really hope so. I am reading a lot of things, as usual, and for now I am pretty happy with how it's going. I don't wanna jinx it for myself, but it is a promising start, let's say.
Today, I am finally here with the first review of 2023 and it is for none other than Rebecca Kuang's Yellowface, the author upcoming literary fiction release, which I was lucky enough to get a physical ARC of. It was one of my most anticipated releases of this year, so I made sure to make it my first read of 2023, otherwise I might have procrastinated it forever.
But, without any further ado, let's get started!
Disclaimer
I received a physical proof of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review; this does not affect my rating nor my opinions in any way. Everything you'll find in this review is what I actually think and it wasn't influenced by anyone. Thank you so much to the publisher for the chance to read and review this book.
About the book
Title: Yellowface
Author: Rebecca Kuang
Publisher: Harper Collins*
Publication date: May 25, 2023
Pages: 350
*I stand with the Harper Collins Union, be sure to check out what's happening.
Plot, as stated on Goodreads
Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars: same year at Yale, same debut year in publishing. But Athena's a cross-genre literary darling, and June didn't even get a paperback release. Nobody 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 to the British and French war efforts 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 takes on questions of diversity, racism, and cultural appropriation not only in the publishing industry but the persistent erasure of Asian-American voices and history by Western white society. R. F. Kuang's novel is timely, razor-sharp, and eminently readable.
My rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Review
Out of the three books by Kuang I've read, this is my least favourite so far. However, this does not mean I didn't like it. On the contrary, I found it to be compulsively readable and it only took me two days to finish it. I am not the biggest literary fiction reader, so this might have influenced my enjoyement of the story — even though I want to say that this book does a great job at mixing a lot of different genres, including thriller and horror, with litfic.
Before we dive into the proper review, I want to say that I found the six references to J*KR and her books completely unnecessary. It's something that bothers me even if done just once, and I really do hope that they are going to cut them out from the final version.
Now, this aside, my favourite thing about the book was definitely how meta it was. I've come to discover that meta fiction is something I really resonate with, and it was interesting to read this book as someone who's starting to work in publishing and has been studying how publishing works for the last five years or so. You can definitely tell that the author has drawn inspiration and knowledge not only from her own experience, but also from that of her fellow authors, and she has painted a pretty comprehensive picture of the industry.
The main character was horrible, but she was supposed to be, and she was really well crafted. She is one of the most unreliable narrators I've ever encountered, and I loved how she tried to justify everything she did, and almost made you feel sorry for her for a few seconds at times. Then you realised what she was actually doing and sat there to ponder for a bit. The part about all the Twitter discourse was one of the best instances of this duality, because no one deserves death threats, no matter how awful they are. At the same time, some people deserve to be called out on their behaviour, but how much is too much? I think some readers are going to find this particular section of the book to be boring, but to me it was one of the most engaging and interesting ones, especially as I have been using Twitter for years.
What I feel like was not as strong as the rest of the book, and it's indeed what made me lower my rating a bit, was the section before the very last pages. I enjoyed immensely the ending itself, but the last forty-ish pages felt a bit off. I said in the beginning that the book did a great job at mixing genres, and I stand by that statement. However, I think that at a very specific point, which I won't be spoiling, of course, there was something lacking. It is a litfic book, in the end, so I did not expect it to handle all the other genres as well as its main one, however it put me out of the story a little, especially seeing as one reveal was very predictable. I don't know if the aim was to make it a sort of shock moment, and I don't want to come across as saying that the "plot twist" was bad, because then again it's not a thriller or whatever, but personally I would have written something a bit different.
In general, if you erase from your mind the references I mentioned above, and if you don't care about the predicatability thing, I think you are going to give this book 5 stars, because the discourse it brings out and the issues in publishing it underlines are really deep and meaningful. I would highly recommend reading this book, especially if you are unaware of how publishing works (taking into account the fact that it's slightly different everywhere in the world, and that every experience has its peculiarity). I am really curious to see what people think once it comes out, because so far the consensus is almost all positive.
This is going to be all for today, I'll talk to you soon with a new review, which — I can already tell you — is going to be for the first mystery I've read this year.
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