This was the message sent to a friend after I’d begun reading Rebecca F. Kuang’s latest best-selling novel Yellowface. More specifically, the message was aimed at her protagonist, June Hayward.

The novel explores the complexities of transactional friendships, includes not-so-subtle jabs at the publishing industry for its lack of accountability when it comes to ethnic minority writers and displays with utter bombast what we do to in order to retain success and prevent perhaps the worst thing we can become in today’s day and age: irrelevant.

We begin with June Hayward lamenting her lack of success as a writer and narrating her life as a barnacle at the bottom of her ‘best’ friend Athena Liu’s literary ship. She accepts invitations to soirees thrown in Athena’s honour and is more than happy to accept offers to buy another round, all the while sipping with seething disdain at all Athena has which should be hers. This leads us to question the idea of entitlement, in terms of how and why people reach the point of believing they are entitled to success and rationalising why others reach it before they do.

For June, Athena being ‘the perfect blend of classical yet exotic’ (hence the quotation at the start) despite being completely self-absorbed is at the root of her success alongside the publishing industry’s need for diversity. Yes, June’s character acknowledges Athena’s writing talent, however this entire section of the novel appears to be the first jab of many pointing out the injustice of expecting young ethnic minorities in the public eye to perfectly represent their culture yet remain palatable enough to sell to Western audiences without a shred of nuance.

But then Athena dies in a freak accident (I won’t spoil it, but it is truly bonkers) and all we are left with is a traumatised June…..along with Athena’s manuscript for her second novel about the Chinese Labor Corps.

What follows is not just an act of theft, but an act of theft that Kuang transforms into a character’s creative process of ‘editing’ ‘sharpening’ ‘refining’ source material. While it becomes clear to us that June is also a talented writer, Kuang also appears to be aware that just as she attributed her friend’s success to diversity quotas, we would only attribute her pending success to stealing Athena’s manuscript. Through repeated tonalities of ‘I know, but….’, our sleeves are desperately pulled away from the theft to what it results in:

A best-selling novel for June Hayward.

Scratch that, Juniper Song.

This is the racially ambiguous name – taken from June’s middle name – suggested to her by her publishing representatives which by happenstance is a Chinese surname, along with a professional photoshoot making her more professionally tanned. At this point, we may reach a fork in the road regarding who actual villain of the piece is. Is it Juniper for riding the diversity train as a Caucasian woman all the way to the bank despite chalking Athena’s stardom down to being a fellow passenger?

Or is it the publishing industry itself for offering up these options to avoid accountability?

It seems to be both, in terms of the creator continuously feeding the monster only to abandon it when the monster has too many pitchforks chasing after it. When Juniper’s first plagiarism scandal enters the Twitter universe followed by various others in which Athena’s own words are accused of being plagiarised, we see her unravel with frantic paranoia and turn to her publishing team for protection…which only lasts so long.

At first, the constant presence of Twitter seems an all-too-obvious way of charting the protagonists rise and fall through praise, reviews, comments, critiques and blatant trolling. Upon closer inspection, the use of the social media platform reads as an ego monitor that displays her serotonin and blind panic when the risk of being exposed, cancelled and irrelevant becomes a reality. There are moments where the keyboard vitriol against June feels fully justified and others which are horrifying, leaving us to wonder what someone deserves for an act of intellectual theft.

Which is why hearing justifications from the thief herself is the most intriguing, albeit infuriating part of it.