R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface hooks you and doesn’t let you go. June Hayward witnesses the accidental death of her friend, esteemed author Athena Liu. She steals Athena's incomplete manuscript, finishes it, and presents it as her original novel titled The Last Front. What ensues is a whirlwind of success, a ghost that June can’t escape, and a heavy dosage of Twitter adding fuel to the fire. I wholeheartedly agree with critics who called Yellowface, “razor sharp, timely, and eminently readable.” But in my opinion, the book is overhyped.

 

Let me be clear. When I say overhyped, I don’t mean that it was bad. I mean that the book was simply not as good as it was made out to be. Hear me out.

 

Authors tend to load the ends of chapters with emotional, heavy-hitting paragraphs to make plot points stick. In Yellowface, some of these parts miss the mark.

 

At her first reading of The Last Front, June sees a woman who looks exactly like Athena. Kuang paints a haunting portrayal of June’s reaction. June experiences a crippling panic attack with crushing symptoms when she reaches her home. But two pages into the next chapter, June completely dismisses the episode.

 

“It’s easy, now, to chalk that vision up to nervous hallucinations; easier still to forget that it happened at all.”

 

This makes perfect sense for an oddity that quickly grabbed your attention. But for something that caused a panic attack? Given her visceral reaction, June's blatant dismissal is hard to believe. While Athena’s ghost continues to haunt June, the ghastly vision doesn’t return until near the end of the novel. An occasional reference to what June saw would’ve made the reader feel her unease. Instead, Kuang undermines the incident altogether and makes readers wonder why the heck she bothered bringing it up.

 

This isn't the only time that Kuang leaves the readers hanging. Early in the novel, June proclaims that “taking Athena’s manuscript felt like reparations, payback for the things that Athena took from [her].” The supposed impactful foreshadowing falls flat because June doesn’t reflect on it throughout the novel. There’s not even an allusion to June’s claim until much later in the novel (at which point she tells us the full story but keeps it hidden from other characters until the last minute). Hinting at this “eye for an eye” justification for stealing Athena’s manuscript would build more suspense and complement the occasional anecdotes supporting that Athena was a thief of words. Instead, the significance of June’s reveal gets lost because the original moment doesn’t readily come to mind. It’s not a shining moment at the end of the chapter, more of an impulsive thought that June waited to return to.

 

Speaking of returning to one’s thoughts – I agreed that Yellowface was "eminently readable." Here's why.

 

June’s distinctly human emotions and actions make us forget that she’s not real. The clearest example is how she distorts the narrative to ensure that she’s never the bad guy. When publishing The Last Front, she claimed the book wouldn’t have taken off without her writing and editing. Her next work, Mother Witch, merely took inspiration from one of Athena’s paragraphs; she wrote the rest herself! On the edge of discovery, she even states that she will “alter the sequence of events” to fit the narrative that she's the hero. June is hardly a sociopath; she’s a human. We tend to believe that we’re in the right, and June embodies this. Kuang used a uniquely human desire to motivate every action and justify every decision June makes, from presenting The Last Front as her own to posing as an ally to the Chinese community.

 

Yellowface is an easy, genuinely engaging read. I would recommend it for book club or as a casual read for those looking to get back into the groove. But to the readers who fixate on traditional literary novel elements and structures, this one’s not for you.