Rating: 3.5 stars

Yes. I read it. For once I read the The Book™. The one everyone and their mum is talking about. And because everyone in the literary world is acutely aware of this Yellowface's existence, and since many have written stellar, dissertation-level reviews of it, I have decided to put my best foot forward and prepare nothing in advance. I finished the book maybe two minutes ago and am opening up a blank note to write this review completely by the seat of my pants. Get ready for me to make even less sense than usual.

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang is about... exactly what everyone has been telling you it is about. It’s so popular, you’ve undoubtedly heard it described by now. (I mean, the ebook is not available to me until March of 2024. That’s like… everyone in my town reserved it.) I'm not about to add to this cacophony of summaries, and we both know you skim over the synopsis portion in reviews of popular books anyway. It's the "if you don't know what Book of the Month is" of written reviews. So no summary from me. No one is disappointed.

So every single character is dumb and hateable, the narrative voice is constantly defensive and whiney, and the plot is stupid and overly dramatic, not to mention completely avoidable... i.e. precisely what Kuang was trying to achieve. It's not the next To Kill a Mockingbird, but it's not trying to be. Yellowface is a giant kerfuffle. It truly is like watching a train crash in slow motion.

But what did I think of it? What is my view? Where do I sit on the spectrum of opinions? Well, get ready for my ground breaking take: it was... really good. (I know, really going against the grain here.) I got exactly what I expected. Yellowface hits every nail on the head with every subject it tackles. Kuang delivered on her promise to write the cataclysmic implosion of an online scandal in the publishing world. We've seen it in real life, now Kuang has given it to us in fictional form. 

So yeah. It good. Read it. I don't know what else to tell you.