Yellowface by RF Kuang
Oh Booktwitter, Bookstagram! You lied.
This wasn’t v. good.
Better than Babel but worse than The Poppy War, Yellowface is about June Hayward who steals a manuscript from her best-selling author frenemy. After her friend dies in a bizarre accident, June polishes up the prose and sells the book as her own without crediting her friend.
Most of the book is just internal angst about Twitter.
Maybe I am not the key demographic for this book (I’m in the over 35 crowd). But how I approach social media is like Marie Kondo – if it doesn’t spark joy, I get rid of it. If people spew hate, I just block them.
So I don’t really feel like we were making progress in this novel because I would not give any credence to these naysayers on Twitter.
There is some commentary on the book community. Some of it was interesting.
I will clarify a few things.
If you write a negative review, you are not supposed to tag the author.
While the internet may seem like The Wild West, GoodReads does have Community Guidelines. GoodReads states, “Criticizing the opinions of others is permitted, but attacking individuals for their opinions is not.”
Personally, I have never had a problem with an author, publisher, or GoodReads. So you can write negative reviews (just make sure not to violate the Community Guidelines).
The book does bring up some interesting points around who gets to tell certain stories and plagiarism.
I found this issue of plagiarism particularly ironic because Yellowface didn’t strike me as very original, essentially a mashup of The Plot by Jean Hanoff Korelitz and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L Frank Baum. Furthermore, RF Kuang had a scene in The Poppy War (published 2018) where the main character was training by carrying a pig up a mountain.
Well, in Holes (a story published in 1998) by Louis Sachar someone carries a pig up a mountain.
However, people create retellings all the time. There are lots of familiar and time-tested tropes and plots. At what point is it plagiarism? This would have been a great book for a book club.
Overall, Yellowface was an average book, definitely not the riveting book, have to read in one sitting that the world has lost its mind over.