Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang

[frogwoman]

Anyone reading this? I am a few hours into the audio book and wow...some absolute horror stories about the publishing industry. As someone who's done some copywriting and sensitivity reading I'm in shock and annoyed at the main character's disrespect to sensitivity readers I can't say that I understand all the twitter drama in the book though and I'm pretty glad I don't

 

[ska invita]

. never mind. got confused.

 

[frogwoman]

.

Sorry yeah, the book is about a woman who steals a manuscript by her best friend after her death and passes it off as her own, the author of the book was Chinese and so she ends up slowly adopting the persona of a Chinese person in order to sell the book. It goes into quite a lot of detail about the lengths she goes to to get followers on social media and how messed up the whole business of publishing is, people who end up criticising the book end up getting cancelled by various twitter cliques and someone who gave the book a one star review ends up facing disciplinary consequences from their job as a result. I am sure some of the stuff in the book is based on fact and I'm finding it pretty shocking.

 

[Silas Loom]

I quite liked Babel. This sounds less enticing, though.

 

[frogwoman]

I quite liked Babel. This sounds less enticing, though.

I'm actually finding it very entertaining and it has more of a nuanced take on stuff like cultural appropriation etc than I necessarily thought from the reviews. The characters are all really fucked up too which is entertaining. She's kept the character exactly the same throughout the book so you don't start to feel sympathetic.