Review: YellowFace by R F Kuang

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have read this for my up coming bookclub meeting, and have to say I was gripped and read it super fast for me! It helps that I'm a writer who used to live on Twitter, so this crosses both worlds I 'lived' in, but this book made me beyond grateful that I'm a self-published author.

It covers the idea of plagerism. The book is written in first person point of view, by the person that stole a book - from a friend, who they witnessed the death of. It's full of moral ambiguity, as it also shows the dirty underbelly of true trolling within the publishing industry as well as by bystanders and also uses the whole 'culture appropriation by white people' narrative too.

It's a boiling hotch-potch of all these topics, and shows how someone can be torn down so easily by those that are jealous of another's success - and yet the person torn down was also jealous of another's success - like the snake eating its own tail.

It also shows the dark underbelly of publishing and the 'next best thing' and how authors have to write to market if they want to make any money. Money is very much alluded to in this book but numbers are never given, which I think is always a shame. Publishing is really about making money off another person's back. An elite set of people in large publishing houses gets to decide who will be successful and rich and who won't. I found it fascinating, but also wondered how much was exaggerated and how much was true.

I'm interested how the other readers in my bookclub found this book being as none of them are writers and never use twitter. I wonder if it might have gone above their heads.

I enjoyed it, others might not. But it's fast paced and well written.

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