Yellowface by R.F. Kuang - Review by Fiona Zhang '28

“The night I watch Athena Liu die, we're celebrating her TV deal with Netflix.”

From the very first line, Kuang seizes our attention, introducing us to the central conflict of the story and our unreliable narrator, June Hayward. June is nothing but trouble, a frustrating protagonist that had me yelling at her over all her terrible choices, but I found myself unable to put the book down.

As an author of a forgotten debut novel with minor success, Hayward’s connection to the literary world hangs by a thread. Athena, on the other hand, is everything June is not. The two women share a tenuous friendship born from their school days, though June envies Athena’s success and blames the industry’s focus on diversity—Athena is Chinese—for her own failures. As June bitterly puts it, “...no one cares about the inner musings of a plain, straight, white girl from Philly.” On the night Athena dies, choking on a pancake, June leaves Athena’s apartment with Athena’s unfinished manuscript of The Last Front, a novel about Chinese laborers during World War I. Convinced she deserves ownership as a kind of reparation, June rebrands herself as Juniper Song—ethnically ambiguous—and publishes the book as her own.

Yellowface explores themes such as racism, cultural appropriation, and the complex world of the publishing industry. Despite their flaws, Kuang makes each character compelling in their own way, especially embracing June’s complexity. Through June as our protagonist, Kuang wins our sympathy, weaving a narrative that makes readers root for June in deeply unsettling ways. Labelled as satire, dark humor is scattered throughout the novel as a critique of the absurdity and hypocrisy of the publishing industry. Kuang herself describes Yellowface as “a horror story about loneliness in a fiercely competitive industry,” hinting at the psychological toll June experiences.

My biggest issue was the novel’s pacing, which undermined Kuang’s sharp social commentary. The plot moved so quickly that I found myself with little time to absorb the weight of its ideas. Kuang shares topics that cannot be simply skimmed over and sacrificed at the cost of finding out what happens to our protagonist.

Ultimately, it’s the creative way Kuang grapples with and tackles each of the individual issues within the novel that makes it so memorable. From mental health to racism to social media, Yellowface touches on it all. Kuang’s writing is beautiful, delicate, and haunting, leaving me shook and yet, at the same time, wanting more.