After seeing all the hype about this book on instagram, tiktok, and practically every book circle on social media, my hopes were high. This, unfortunately, did not live up to it.
At it's core, it was a really interesting premise: Author dies, her friend steals her manuscript, pretends to be Asian. Except... she doesn't.

The characters are all insufferable. I didn't care for any of them. June is an absolutely unlikeable character. I know we aren't supposed to like her, but when reading a book from someone's POV, you tend to want to have something to root for or at least have fun reading about a bad person. June was neither of those things.
She kept trying to justify things that were unjustifiable, in a mad attempt to rid herself of blame and soothe her guilty conscience. And while I understand that June didn't want to be a villain, it almost would have made the book more enjoyable if she did what she did maliciously, so we could see those thoughts and really see her hatred for Athena shine through. As it was, the writing and the characters felt so juvenile and flat, with nothing backing them up or turning them into real people.

The book, despite being only 300-something pages, felt way too long. Probably because the plot was just a repeat of the same conflict twice, with some "close calls" in between that had little to no stakes in the main book.

June's decision to publish another book while having stolen the book (again) from Athena was mental. Not just on her end, but on the story's end. Because why are we having the SAME conflict happen two times in a row? And why would she be so stupid not to cover her tracks better the second time? It's baffling to me that June seems to be able to write a full book, but leaves in an entire paragraph that she didn't write? Girl, just put it into ChatGPT and reword it. It was stupid, I thought, and made me really frustrated because I didn't feel like we were reading anything new.

Additionally, I feel like the title "Yellowface" was almost misleading. I expected June to actually legitimately pretend to be Asian. Instead, her publishing company just pushed the name "Juniper Song" on her, and that was... kind of the extent of it. Many people assumed she was Asian, but she never once agreed with that or leaned into it. That was the angle I wanted, that I thought would have been the most interesting.
And don't get me started on the end.

Someone from June's publishing team that had been fired because of a conflict she had with June came back and... checks notes... hacked into June's dead friend's instagram account to start posting grotesquely photoshopped pictures of Athena dead or dying just to taunt June into thinking she's being haunted? Sorry? Is NO ONE ELSE seeing how INSANE that is? Again: Every. Single. Character. Is just such a horrible person and I didn't have anyone I truly liked. And then June gets pushed off a roof, and... yeah.

This was a book I wish I had DNF-ed, but kept pushing, because I wanted it to get better. It unfortunately did not.