YELLOWFACE
February's pick! Would you take credit for someone else's work?
Athena Liu is a literary darling and June Hayward is literally nobody.
White lies
When Athena dies in a freak accident, June steals her unpublished manuscript and publishes it as her own under the ambiguous name Juniper Song.
Dark humour
But as evidence threatens June’s stolen success, she will discover exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.
Deadly consequences…
What happens next is entirely everyone else’s fault.
Rebecca F. Kuang is a Marshall Scholar, translator, and award-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Poppy War trilogy and Babel: An Arcane History, among others. She has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford; she is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale.
YELLOWFACE means: the practice of white actors changing their appearance with makeup in order to play East Asian characters in movies, plays, etc.
Drinks on the Books
Reading into the book
We are 50% into the book and so far the narrative’s been slow, Juniper Song took advantage of her “best friend’s” death, stole her manuscript and wrote the story as her own, then she has to embrace a group of haters that find the similarities between Athena’s books and The Last Front.
There is a comparison in the book of Juniper Song and Scarlet Johansson, were she played as Japanese girl in the movie Ghost in the Shell, referring to a yellowface example.
Do you think Scarlet Johansson looks like an Asian in that movie?
What to wear
