Please be aware this review contains spoilers so don’t read on if you’ve not read the book!
R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface is a sharp and unsettling literary thriller about ambition, appropriation and the stories we claim as our own. The novel follows June Hayward, a struggling white writer who seizes the opportunity to publish the unfinished manuscript of her more successful peer Athena Liu after Athena’s sudden death. June reshapes it, markets it under a new title and catapults herself into literary stardom. The success feels triumphant, but it comes with a constant shadow of suspicion and a growing fear that the truth will come out.
June is an awful character, yet impossible to look away from. She justifies her theft with alarming ease, convincing herself that her edits make her a co-creator rather than a fraud. Her inner voice is scathing and witty, and it is disturbing to admit how enjoyable it is to read her delusions. Kuang captures that sticky feeling where you know you should despise someone, but their audacity and sheer nerve are so extreme that it becomes entertaining.
Moments where June manipulates others to protect her secret, such as steering Athena’s mother away from archiving her daughter’s notebooks, show just how far she is willing to go. When whispers of plagiarism begin circulating online, the tension spikes. Part of you wants her exposed, but another part cannot resist seeing how she might twist things in her favour. Her brazenness has a bizarre charm that makes you complicit in her game.
The more she chases validation, the more unhinged she becomes. Her follow up work, Mother Witch, repeats the same mistakes, echoing Athena’s writing once again. She is driven by a cocktail of loneliness, envy and a desperate hunger for recognition. Left alone with her thoughts, she spins increasingly elaborate fantasies, each one swelling her ego until she is living in a world of her own invention.
The final act veers closer to thriller territory, and at times it borders on the exaggerated. The big reveal felt too neatly packaged, almost like a rushed explanation compared to the slow psychological unravelling that came before. Still, the book works best as a portrait of obsession and the dangerous pull of attention, showing how easily reality can warp when someone is desperate to be seen.
I enjoyed reading Yellowface. It proved that a narrator does not have to be sympathetic to be captivating. June is a terrible person, yet following her downfall was strangely exhilarating. The novel has been showered with acclaim, and while I thought it was very good, I did not find it quite as groundbreaking as some reviews suggested. What it does deliver is a bold, addictive character study that holds a mirror to the reader and asks why we are so entertained by watching someone behave so badly.