Yellowface

June Hayward has always wanted to be a writer, but she’s not so good at the whole coming up with her own ideas thing. Her friend Athena Liu, on the other hand, is a star. Her debut novel was a success, and she’s just been offered a deal with Netflix. Even after her sudden death, Athena’s legacy is immortalised within the literary world, while June is left to simmer in her own jealousy. That is, until she picks up the recently completed manuscript Athena left behind. A manuscript nobody even knows about. A manuscript that could change June’s life forever.

June is haunted by her own ambition and ignorance, and her voice is so tightly woven within the narrative that it makes it hard to do anything other than read while this book is within reach. Rebecca F Kuang has written June as such a convincing, dislikeable character that you can’t help but scoff and gawk at her lack of understanding about the importance of (yet lack of) diversity and representation in publishing, or about the fact that plagiarism and deceit are morally wrong. While Athena could have easily been written as a flat, minor character, she too is complex, possessing relationships and views of the world that reveal themselves to be more problematic than wonderous.

While Kuang’s voice sometimes seeps into the personal, at times overriding the protagonist’s perspective, it divulges critical information about racism within the literary world and within society more broadly. I would be very surprised if this book does not make you stop and question your own understandings and assumptions about our obsession with literary darlings and prizes, about whose stories authors should be writing, and about whose work publishers should be sharing.