Coincidentally having stumbled into reading this book turned out to be such a positive surprise! Despite having previously judged it by its cover that screamed “pop culture” and “latest booktok suggestion”, I ended up really enjoying it. It was a witty, funny, fast-paced and enjoyable novel. Yes, the tone and the style were light and easily digestible, not making it the next literary revelation. Yes, it did have quite a few clichés within it. Regardless of that, I really appreciated the amount and variety of topics it tackled within the publishing industry. It made me want to discuss the book and exchange with others on the satirical opinions expressed within it. The debate of who has the right to tell which story, whether it matters from which type of readers you’re getting your income, the critique of social media when linked to authors’ careers or how decisive an author’s personal brand is in order to be able to drive sales.

It’s not that Athena isn’t talented. She’s a fucking good writer—I’ve read all her work, and I’m not too jealous to acknowledge good writing when I see it. But Athena’s star power is so obviously not about the writing. It’s about her. Athena Liu is, simply put, so fucking cool. Even her name—Athena Ling En Liu—is cool; well done, Mr. and Mrs. Liu, to choose a perfect combination of the classical and exotic.

p. 5

But enter professional publishing, and suddenly writing is a matter of professional jealousies, obscure marketing budgets, and advances that don’t measure up to those of your peers. Editors go in and mess around with your words, your vision. Marketing and publicity make you distill hundreds of pages of careful, nuanced reflection into cute, tweet-size talking points. Readers inflict their own expectations, not just on the story, but on your politics, your philosophy, your stance on all things ethical. You, not your writing, become the product—your looks, your wit, your quippy clapbacks and factional alignments with online beefs that no one in the real world gives a shit about.

p. 256

Having studied Publishing myself, I can confirm that so many of the bizarre things expressed actually ring true. How it’s already decided in advance at the moment a book is taken on by a publishing agency, whether it will be worth a big marketing budget or not, thus laying the foundation of the potential for the book to become a bestseller. How minority writers are becoming publishers’ favorites, while at the same time they don’t want them to be too numerous among the totality of their publications. How no matter which publicity is received, bad or good, it is great news for a book if it has potential to bring up the sales.

Why doesn’t anyone tell you, right off the bat, how important your book is to the publisher? Before “Over the Sycamore” came out, I worked my ass off doing blog interviews and podcasts, hoping that the more sweat I put into publicity, the more my publisher would reward my efforts. But now, I see, author efforts have nothing to do with a book’s success. Bestsellers are chosen. Nothing you do matters. You just get to enjoy the perks along the way.

p. 74

And I wonder if that’s the final, obscure part of how publishing works: if the books that become big do so because at some point everyone decided, for no good reason at all, that this would be the title of the moment.

p. 79

I really enjoyed getting to know the protagonist better, feeling as if the layers of an onion were being peeled off as the story advanced, revealing new nuances of her personality. Her thoughts were expressed in a way sounding honest and raw, making me understand why some readers critiqued the writing for not finding any of the characters likeable or relateable. For me though, that was one of my favourite parts about “Yellowface”. The way the author managed to describe them in such a real way, unflinching of showing their worst sides.

Don’t we all want a friend who won’t ever challenge our superiority, because they already know it’s a lost cause? Don’t we all need someone we can treat as a punching bag?

p. 7

Teenagers, after all, are unformed identities with undeveloped brains. No matter how clever they are, they still don’t know much about anything, and it’s easy to embarrass them for their ill-prepared remarks.

p. 247

Concerning the language, it had a mix of extremely colloquial turns of phrases but also very interesting and vivid visual comparisons. Rebecca Kuang definitely mastered the art of keeping the tension on the plot, making the reader want to continue on with the narrative, in order to find out what would happen next.

I stare at Athena’s brown eyes, framed by those ridiculously large lashes that make her resemble a Disney forest animal, and I wonder, What is it like to be you? What is it like to be so impossibly perfect, to have every good thing in the world? And maybe it’s the cocktails, or my overactive writer’s imagination, but I feel this hot coiling in my stomach, a bizarre urge to stick my fingers in her berry-red-painted mouth and rip her face apart, to neatly peel her skin off her body like an orange and zip it up over myself.

p. 9

Athena had a magpie’s eye for suffering. This skill united all her best-received works. She could see through the grime and sludge of facts and details to the part of the story that bled. She collected true narratives like seashells, polished them off, and presented them, sharp and gleaming, to horrified and entranced readers.

p. 109-110

This leads me to the final topic that I wanted to touch upon – the question of the morality of using other people’s suffering as material for one’s books. This circles back to the discussion of whether someone, who for example has no links to China whatsoever, would be in the right position to tell stories from and about that country. More generally speaking, it additionally opened up the debate of where authors get material for their stories and the impact it has on the closest people in their lives, if it is linked to personal occurrences.

Athena never personally experienced suffering. She just got rich from it. She wrote an award-winning short story based on what she saw at that exhibit, titled “Whispers along the Yalu.” And she wasn’t even Korean.

p. 111

So we’d get into fights, right? Stupid stuff, like her dog allergy, or having joint finances—anyways, it felt so important at the time. And I’d yell something desperate, something vulnerable, only to find those same words published in a short story the very next month. Sometimes, when we fought, she would give me this very cool, narrow-eyed look. I knew that look, because it was the same look she got when she was drafting a scene. And I never knew if she was really there during our relationship, or if the whole thing for her was some kind of ongoing story, if she did what she did just to document my reaction.

p. 280

My reason for rating the book with 4/5 ★ was due to the fact that I definitely perceived it much better than an average 3/5 ★ read. It didn’t quite measure up to the highest 5/5 ★ rating for me though. Some passages had a slight tinge of Hollywood rom-com movies to them, which fit quite well with the judgement I had of the cover. It was also partly due to the fact that you sensed the author’s young age due to some of the references used, among others, linking the iconic “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” lyrics to Kanye West instead of Daft Punk. Comparing “Yellowface” to the rest of the books the author has published though, I nevertheless can’t help but be impressed by the diversity of her talent within multiple genres!

★★★★☆ (4/5)

_{Edition: ISBN 978-0-00-853278-9
The Borough Press, 2023}