Review: Yellow Face – R. F. Kuang

Yellowface by R. F. Kuang
Published: May 16, 2023 by William Morrow
Genres: Contemporary, Literary Fiction
Pages: 323
Purchase: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Kobo | Libro.fm (Audiobook)
Goodreads

When failed writer June Hayward witnesses her rival Athena Liu die in a freak accident, she sees her opportunity… and takes it.

So what if it means stealing Athena’s final manuscript?
So what if it means ‘borrowing’ her identity?
And so what if the first lie is only the beginning…

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My Thoughts

Feels like it was yesterday when I bought R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface and Babel after eating up all of The Poppy War in less than 2 months. My vacation had just ended and I was ready to read more from her. I couldn’t even wait for the books to get published here in Brazil: I imported both hardcovers.

Since my main genre SFF, I went for Babel right away and… It would end up as one of my least liked books from that year. I had to finish the book by sheer will power in case the author dropped some crazy shit but it ended just about the way I expected it to. The fact I was fresh out of The Poppy War might have played a big role in this, since that book has a cast with very strong personalities and there is some shit happening at all times while in Babel I was mostly… bored. Don’t get me wrong, I get the book, but my enjoyment of a book relies heavily on how an author delivers their message, the satire, the moments of reflection and whatever else. Maybe Dark Academia is just not for me.

After that, I took a bit of a “Kuang Hiatus” and let Yellowface get cozy on my bookshelf. I still was very much interested in reading more from her, but I clearly needed some rest time. Fast forward: here we are, January 2025, a little over a year since I bought it and finally I have read Yellowface! Ironically… I read it as an audiobook. Welp. At least I find the cover very pretty to still want to have it in physical.

I found Yellowface such an easy book to get hooked on. It’s fast, funny and merciless: Kuang never stops firing bullets at the state of book publishing and book discourse on social media. Readers who are able to limit their screen time to read even more books are true fighters. I can’t do it like them: I enjoy reading books and I like to talk about books even more so I am someone who spends a lot of time surfing the book community space online (usually Youtube and Bluesky, I don’t use Twitter anymore). While watching the mess unfold, I was having war flashbacks from the countless book drama moments I witnessed. There were many I agreed with, of course, but as Yellowface shows: The way the a discourse grows online in a matter of days is absolutely scary. People will just take someone’s word as the truth instead of doing the research themselves. Sometimes they aren’t even that invested: they just want to add more fuel to the trainwreck that is trying to make sense of the current issue on booktwitter or booktok.

The novel also revolves around the subject of culture appropiation and how people will judge if someone is allowed or not to portray certain things in your novel. God forbid you make reference to a historical event and not portray it with utmost accuracy… Something that R. F. Kuang probably got shit for after The Poppy War by someone online? This goes further with the fact Kuang is an asian-american author writing from a white woman’s POV.

This was such a fun read for me and I couldn’t put the audiobook down. Sadly I didn’t think the book landed the ending very well and for that I deducted half a star.

I don’t know if any company has bought the rights to make it into a movie/series but they absolutely should!

A New Book

R. F. Kuang is set to release her new book Katabasis on August 26, 2025 and I’m here for it. I don’t like when blurbs compare the current book to another novel but I confess they caught me when they wrote “Dante’s Inferno meets Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi“!