Yellowface Book Review: The Most Uncomfortable Book I Couldn't Put Down

Rating: ★★★★★

"Yellowface" Book Review:

R.F. Kuang is, at this point, operating on a level that should be illegal. After the Poppy War trilogy proved she could write epic military fantasy that would make your soul hurt, she pivoted to contemporary literary satire and somehow got even sharper. Yellowface is a book about the publishing industry written like a thriller, and it cuts so deep that everyone who reads it feels personally attacked. That's the point.

Here's the setup, and it's brilliantly simple: June Hayward is a white author. Her career is going nowhere. Her Asian American friend Athena Liu is a literary superstar. One night, Athena chokes to death in front of June—a freak accident—and June takes Athena's unpublished manuscript. She edits it, puts her own name on it, uses an ambiguous author photo and her middle name to imply she might be Asian, and publishes it to massive acclaim. Then the internet starts asking questions.

What makes Yellowface so wickedly effective is that Kuang writes June's perspective from the inside. You hear every justification, every rationalization, every moment where June convinces herself that she deserves this, that she improved the manuscript, that Athena would have wanted this. And the horrifying thing is—you almost buy it. Not because June is right, but because Kuang understands self-deception so well that she makes you complicit in it. You catch yourself nodding along and then you feel disgusted with yourself, and that's exactly the reaction Kuang is engineering.

This is a book about cultural appropriation, obviously. But it's also about the machinery of publishing—who gets deals, whose stories are valued, how diversity becomes a marketing strategy rather than a moral imperative. It's about the internet's ability to both expose injustice and destroy people with equal enthusiasm. It's about the stories we tell ourselves to sleep at night when we know we've done something unforgivable.

Kuang wrote this with a scalpel in one hand and a sense of humor in the other. It's darkly funny in a way that makes you wince. The satire is specific enough to feel like a roman a clef and universal enough to implicate everyone who's ever worked in creative industries. I finished it in two sittings, not because it was a page-turner in the traditional sense, but because I needed to see how far June would fall and whether she'd ever hit bottom.

<h2> If You Liked Yellowface, Try:

• My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh — Another deeply unlikable female narrator making terrible choices, written with the same dark humor and refusal to moralize.

• Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid — A sharper-than-it-looks novel about race, privilege, and performative allyship that will make you examine your own blind spots.

• Writers & Lovers by Lily King — A warmer take on the struggling-writer life, but with the same insider knowledge of how the publishing world chews people up.

From Luke Stoffel's Bookshelf

If this book review resonated with you, check out How to Win a Million Dollars and Shit Glitter — a memoir that understands the publishing world's hunger for spectacle and reinvention, written by a hustler who built his own story instead of stealing someone else's. Learn More: How to Win One Million Dollars

<h2> SEO

- Title Tag: Yellowface Book Review: R.F. Kuang's Sharpest Book Yet

- Meta Description: R.F. Kuang's Yellowface is a razor-sharp satire about cultural appropriation in publishing. Darkly funny, deeply uncomfortable, impossible to put down.

- URL Slug: /yellowface-rf-kuang-book-review