Read This Book…

June Hayward and Athena Liu met in undergrad and initially bonded over their love of literature and a shared dream of one day becoming authors. Fast forward a few years after college graduation and Athena is a successful, well-published author. June has a debut that flopped. Even though they don’t seem to really like each other anymore, they still occasionally hang out, and one fateful night Athena dies in a tragic, stupid accident and June steals the recently completed first draft of her next book. It’s brilliant, but rough. June tells herself she’s going to polish it off, in Athena’s memory. But before long, she’s immersed in the work, and she makes the fateful decision to pass the book off as her own. Pretty soon, the book has an amazing deal and her publishing team rebrands June, who is white, into the racially ambiguous Juniper Song. The novel launches her into the successful career she’s always dreamed of—but at what cost?

I feel like I should state upfront that if you’re not the type of person who cares about how the sausage gets made when it comes to publishing, and you don’t like books with antiheroes making increasingly terrible decisions, this book might frustrate you! However, it’s spectacularly written and endlessly compelling, and Kuang really knows how to sustain tension throughout the entire novel without losing the reader — I inhaled this book, and so did many other people I know. It’s a not-so-subtle commentary on literary scandals, and the parallels between June’s situation and the controversy surrounding American Dirt are obvious. But Yellowface goes deeper than just the real-life drama of the literary world and asks questions about what it means to be a writer, to create, to take inspiration from life, and to use the experiences of others in order to write a story that you profit from. It’s also about what kinds of stories are told and how the publishing industry shapes those stories. As a writer and someone entrenched in that world, there was a lot that was relatable and a fair amount that was horrifying. I thought I was getting a messy book about publishing, but the story takes the shape of a suspense novel fairly quickly (will June get caught?) and toward the end even verges on horror. It perfectly encapsulates all the ways that publishing can mess with your mind, and by the end I wasn’t sure what I wanted to happen next.

This book will mess with your head a little bit, and make you want to take a social media detox, but in a good way! It’ll also be one you won’t be able to stop talking about, so definitely pick it up!