I finished Yellowface in four days a few months ago, so some details might be a little fuzzy. I jotted down my thoughts as I was reading it in my commonplace book so I’m going to flesh them out a bit more here. I’m not going to include a summary here, there are better ones out there than what I can come up with. I’m also going to start with a disclaimer that I am usually a fantasy/sci-fi reader, though I can occasionally enjoy an odd literary fiction.

I had just read Kuang’s previous book, Babel, before Yellowface, so I inadvertently ended up comparing the two, especially on the prose level. Her straightforward writing style works a lot better in Yellowface, which is more lit fic, than Babel, which is more fantasy (and as a reader, I demand a lot from fantasy worldbuilding). There are also similar themes about race, but from two very different centuries. Another similarity is the characterization. All the characters feel very surface level, but again this is fine for Yellowface, as their actions are more familiar to us modern humans and Athena and June feel like real, terminally online writers we might have today. Babel didn’t rely as heavily on character tropes, and it felt like an opportunity was missed in delving deeper into the main characters and their motivations to justify several plot points.

Having watched a handful of interviews with Kuang on both books, I can see what she was trying to convey with both. Yellowface, for all intents and purposes, did what it set out to do. I like that, despite how June kept rubbing me the wrong way. Which was kind of the point. Babel, on the other hand, was a little more clumsy in delivering its message in a compelling way. As someone who occasionally translates for my parents and translates subtitles as a means of language study, I loved that the act of translation was the magic system. So it was all the more disappointing when it wasn’t fully explored or fleshed out. I also found the ending to be unsatisfyingly open ended. I know Kuang wanted to leave the ending up for interpretation, but it felt like it was too open.

Back to Yellowface. While it was an entertaining read, the social media references are going to get dated real fast (Twitter is now unfortunately X, a year after this book was published). The Last Front by Athena Liu definitely sounds like a callback to Babel. Hell, Athena almost sounds like Kuang’s self-insert. I don’t remember specifically what happened in chapter 20, but I wrote “2016 called and it wants its meta AF plots back”, so take that how you will.

I have yet to read the Poppy War trilogy and I’m avoiding all synopses and spoiler reviews, because I enjoy going into new books with very little expectations. I just need to be in the right mood to read it. But all in all, I find Kuang’s writing easy to read, if a bit impersonal. She mainly writes fantasy, but I find her voice more fitting for literary fiction. I am looking forward to her next book, Katabasis, though.

Yellowface rating: 3.5/5

Babel rating: 3/5