Face

Product Information

and to be clear, this isn't a blanket response to everyone who disagrees with me (i've had interesting conversations with people who do)--just to some people who are determined to take the most uncharitable opinion possible of a frankly lukewarm review. Face was written by Benjamin Zephaniah in 1999, and was his first novel after he gained notoriety as a poet. It follows teenage Martin on his journey of self-discovery after a serious accident leaves him severely burnt across his body, but mostly on his face.

No one is likable, including Athena, but I was glued to the story as I alternately laughed out loud and recoiled in disgust. Was I not meant to admit that? Should I have, instead, gone on long, rambling, and yet tersely flat paragraphs about how ironic it is that I am negatively critiquing a book about plagiarism by using the same points as everyone else? Should I call this satire—granted that there is nothing humorous and that I am not particularly strongly exaggerating anything—as I amateurly write prose so unabashedly written in my own voice that it would be impossible to separate any idea from my own? Because that appears to be the direction this book has gone in. This book was a fascinating look into the mind of the worst kind of person in the online bookish community.BABEL Yeah, it's not one of those 'if you like this you'll like that' situations. This book is different in every aspect, if I hadn't known I wouldn't think it was written by the same person. BUT IT'S EQUALLY AS BRILLIANT. Doesn't that really picture the talent and originality of this writer? This industry is built on silencing us, stomping us into the ground, and hurling money at white people to produce racist stereotypes of us.’ Face was okay, but it wasn’t Zephaniah’s best – it was a little too preachy, too much like a moral tale, and it took me a while to get into it. Even once I’d been absorbed into the story line, I didn’t enjoy it much, although I did appreciate that the large print made it easy for me to power through it. Well, there is a story in Holes (published 1998) by Louis Sachar where someone carries a pig up a mountain.

And let’s take this a step further and look at how Kuang illustrated the danger that publishing has ultimately created with it’s use of terms like #ownvoices. Athena wasn’t ever allowed to write outside of trauma. She’s pigeonholed into only writing one thing. And honestly, I’m sure that happens more than we would like to believe. Authors who want to explore something outside of their “assigned” roles either get turned down or the marketing is trash. It delves deeper into the question of who is allowed to tell what story? Was Athena any better of a fit to tell the story of Chinese laborers of WWI than June? Is research enough to tell something outside of one’s lived experience? These are things to think about and something that we are confronted with every day in this community. Think about books like American Dirt and Memoirs of a Geisha. So even though I didn’t agree with all of Kuang’s satirical commentary in Yellowface (e.g., I think Asian Americans should be asked hard, critical questions about glorifying whiteness both in dating partners and in other areas of life), I respect that she seized a popular topic in the publishing industry and made a novel out of it. The exaggerated nature of satire doesn’t always lend itself to a deeper emotional connection with the characters or the story, though I don’t think a deep emotional connection is necessarily the point of this novel. Overall, while I don’t see this novel breaking into my top ten list at the end of this year, I found it an interesting read and one that may be fun to discuss. June is with Athena when she chokes to death. I implied she maybe had something to do with her death. June is a very unreliable narrator. Do with that what you will. Anyway, Athena has a manuscript that she has begun. June steals, edits, and publishes it. June's new publishers think her name is too white (because she is white), and rebrand her Juniper Song. Ambiguous. As ambiguous as ScarJo's Japaneseness. And Emma Stone's Vietnameseness. it's certainly well-written, but personally i didn't like the writing style or the narrative voice. i know rfk intended the characters to be unlikeable, but i did not root for them at any point of the book. i was irritated most of the time, so i can't really say that i enjoyed reading this. i've read my fair share of books peopled with unlikeable characters, but this one here is just unbearable and repetitive. it got so boring the last third of the book that i had to take a nap before continuing. This is not an unfamiliar premise. So, what makes this story different? June’s voice. She’s funny, snarky, and totally without morals. She’s a literary psychopathic Jane Doe/Joe (thriller readers , you know who I’m talking about!) who can justify anything she does. She's unlikable, which is the author's intent.The most insidious moment sees June travels to Washington DC’s Chinatown for “inspiration” to “find some good narrative potential” at a Chinese restaurant, accosting an innocent waiter and demanding he tell her something interesting about himself. Utterly oblivious to her imperial, colonialist mindset, this scene made my brain writhe in disgust, perhaps because it speaks so close to reality.