I can tell she’s trying to add texture to her characters’ lives, to show the readers where they come from and the webs in which they exist, but she’s gone way overboard. It’s distracting from the central narrative. Reading should be an enjoyable experience, not a chore.
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Reading should be an enjoyable experience, not a chore. Reading lets us live in someone else’s shoes. Literature builds bridges; it makes our world larger, not smaller.
Yellowface
by R. F. Kuang
So when June witnesses Athena’s death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse: she steals Athena’s just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers during World War I.
So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? Doesn’t this piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller? That’s what June claims, and the New York Times bestseller list seems to agree.
But June can’t get away from Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens to bring June’s (stolen) success down around her. As June races to protect her secret, she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.
With its totally immersive first-person voice, Yellowface grapples with questions of diversity, racism, and cultural appropriation, as well as the terrifying alienation of social media. R.F. Kuang’s novel is timely, razor-sharp, and eminently readable.
Reading lets us live in someone else’s shoes. Literature builds bridges; it makes our world larger, not smaller.
The good news keeps piling up. Brett emails me with updates on foreign rights sales. We’ve sold rights in Germany, Spain, Poland and Russia. Not France, yet, but we’re working on it, says Brett. But nobody sells well in France. If the French like you, then you’re doing something very wrong.
Do you know what it’s like to pitch a book and be told they already have an Asian writer ? That they can’t put out two minority stories in the same season ? That Athena Liu already exists, so you’re redundant ? This industry is built on silencing us, stomping us into the ground, and hurling money at white people to produce racist stereotypes of us.