Karen commits plagiarism and loses mind over Twitter trolls - Yellowface by R. F. Kuang (Review)

 A/N: This review contains mild spoilers for Yellowface by Rebecca. F. Kuang. This is your spoiler warning. 

I think I need to preface this review by saying that this book has caused a lot of online discourse about the author’s personal opinions, so first I’d like to just focus on this book alone without any added context. But I’d also like to delve a little into why adding the ‘drama’ as context actually does raise some valid questions.

Yellowface was like reading a fictionalized book version of a dramatic reality television show. I admit that I picked up this book because I like R.F Kuang but was too intimidated to read Babel and I did not regret it one bit. It tells the story of Juniper Hayward, our token white protagonist and literary Karen, who steals her famous dead friend- Athena Liu’s manuscript. She then proceeds to edit and publish it as her own, achieve fame and lose her mind. 

Athena and June are out on a girls night, drinking and celebrating the former’s TV deal with Netflix when Athena dies. Her way of dying is pretty anticlimactic and comical and I don’t want to ruin it if you haven’t already heard about it. June decides that enough is enough and she deserves some fame too and she steals Athena’s work on her way out of the house. She doesn’t spend much time feeling guilty about Athena’s death because she’s always despised her and been jealous of her fame and success. She gets a great book deal and gets published with much acclaim and attention from the literary world. She also ends up receiving criticism for being a white author writing about Chinese laborers in WW1. This soon devolves into people calling her racist for her plot decisions and also blatantly calling her out for ‘possible’ plagiarism.

The drama unfolds with June being accused of yellowface and Asian-baiting by changing the name she publishes under to sound ethnically ambiguous. She attends events where people question her credibility and she dismisses everything as opinions rising out of jealousy. When her publisher finally questions the authorial decision to write about such a niche piece of Asian history she decides to prove them wrong by writing a novella. But that just makes the bubble of popularity she’s living in implode. And drama follows.

The thing with literary and contemporary fiction is that it’s hard to distinguish a reviewable plot point or character development from a potential spoiler. So that’s probably the most I can tell you without giving everything away. Let’s focus on the craft instead. 

The writing is engaging and accessible. It’s hard to put down and made me laugh wryly at times which I guess should be expected from a satirical piece about the publishing industry. My main concern was how little it actually explored the racism in said industry like the pitch suggested it would. More time was spent in Book Twitter and Goodreads drama. It focused more on the reviewers than on actual writers at times and every mention of Athena or June’s contemporaries was to emphasize either about how jealous they were or to say that they were superficial humans organized into cliques and everything was a popularity contest. The messaging was rarely subtle and sometimes the characters just seem like caricatures of their stereotypes. While I can acknowledge that it could be a clever literary decision on Kuang’s part, I did feel that it detracted from the book at times because of how surface level it was?


It is a good book and for the uninitiated, this would be a great point to start reading about the literary world and the attached online drama. But if you're looking to understand the publishing sphere, this isn’t something I’d recommend. The book does have some great discussion about internet fame and social media toxicity and also about how even with Asian voices being brought to the forefront, not everyone gets to be heard. Privilege is real and diversity is often a money-making tactic. I really did enjoy the book so let’s just talk about the author for a moment.


I did my research on the internet as one does after reading a book that they really liked to see what everyone else thinks about it. There’s talk about the writer being petty/ using Athena’s character as a self-insert to address some criticism in the reviews she’s gotten for her previous work. All I want to say is if we as a community can enjoy Harry Potter because apparently ‘the art is separate from the artist’ despite transphobia then Yellowface can be read without the author’s alleged refusal to take criticism being a major issue. But that’s just me speculating.


Here’s three things that amused me about the book:

  1. The constant name dropping of authors, publishers and actors
  2. The unnecessary inclusion of words like antimiscegenation, consanguinity, epistemology, simulacrum, etc.
  3. The definition of terms like sensitivity readers, dramatis personae, etc., being included?


The book isn’t “quotable” because pretty much all my annotations are for racist crap June says. But here’s some that might give you an idea:

Writing is the closest thing we have to real magic. Writing is creating something out of nothing, is opening doors to other lands. Writing gives you power to shape your own world when the real one hurts too much.
(The aesthetic of a writer’s life that this book delivers was fun to read about.)

Athena was not a real Marxist; she was a champagne socialist at best.
(This made me giggle.)

Kim Jong Un’s girlboss propagandist sister immediately comes to mind.
(I was not supposed to cackle at this like I did. Oh my god, this was super racist in the book’s context.)

The more popular a book becomes, the more popular it becomes to hate on said book, which is why revulsion for Rupi Kaur’s poetry has become a millennial personality trait.
(I wonder if Rupi Kaur knows.)

A/N: It is hard to tread the line between just being plain rude and being a constructive critic and I worry about it all the time. I hope you pick this book up because the drama was a roller coaster ride and just fun to read. I love satirical discussions about sad stuff like racism and sexism.

Thank you for reading the tenth installment in my ‘Women of Words’ series where I read feminist literature by a new feminist author each month. 

What is your favorite feminist read? Please feel free to drop your suggestions so that I can add them to my already excessively long TBR list for this series.

To read the previous installment, here’s my take on The Haunting of Alejandra by V.Castro.









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