deeb_reads's reviews
137 reviews

Erasure is a witty, intellectual, and very human novel about many things. Writing (artistically and commercially), family, identity, probably some other stuff I left off this very short list. I do think it's well written and biting, but at the same time it didn't grab me personally the way some other books have.

I appreciated the writing in this book the most when it came to characterization and character relationships. Monk's family feels fully fleshed out, even characters like his father, who have been deceased for years and only appear in flashbacks. Their relationships are complex and seem very real. Percival Everett manages to sketch these relationships and character personalities through even quick moments and interactions, which is a big breath of fresh air compared to some other trashy books I've been reading lately. In particular, Monk's interactions with his mother as she struggles with dementia are poignant and balance out the more absurd humor of the rest of the book.

I also liked Monk as a character. He's intellectually snobbish, socially awkward, and the exact opposite of the swaggering ex-con persona he adopts to write his satirical novel. As a narrator, he's snarky and also pretty profound. The main issue I had with Monk's narration is the little interludes of Latin and literary references. I am sure that it's in character, but as a normie and not an English professor, I struggled to understand what the interludes added to the story besides establishing that Monk is an academic and a bit of a pretentious oddball.

As a satire, I found it interesting but probably would have needed to know more about the specific areas being satirized (academic literary conventions, book awards, gritty "urban" novels about stereotypical Black characters) to get the full experience. I did appreciate the over the top metafiction and absurd posturing of the literary critics in the beginning of the book, as well as some of the antics that publishers get up to in pursuit of Monk's mysterious alter ego, Stagg R. Leigh.

I do wish I knew more about the books that are directly being critiqued by Erasure and Monk's in-universe novel. People have brought up Invisible Man and Push as examples of books about traumatized poor Black characters, which potentially promote problematic images of Black American life. Erasure's Fuck and We's Lives in Da Ghetto are both clearly inauthentic because they're written by middle class/ upper middle class Black authors, who do not have these lived experiences and are merely regurgitating existing stereotypes of Black characters. Meanwhile, Invisible Man and Push were both written by authors who did experience poverty. It is harder to call these books inauthentic and problematic if they do reflect the author's actual life experiences.

Additionally, I'm mixed on Everett's need to include Monk's novel Fuck / My Pafology in the book in its entirety. On the one hand, it's good to see the absurdity of the work that Monk publishes and makes readers extra shocked at the glowing reception it receives from white critics. (I appreciated some inclusion of the novel's actual text, which is one thing I wish other satires about publishing like Yellowface did.) On the other, it takes up a significant portion of an already short book and kind of messes with the pacing in my mind. 

For me personally, I would have liked the book a little more if the satire had gone harder in the second half of the book. I don't think it's a bad creative choice for Everett to dig into Monk's family for genuine pathos in this part, but the parts I found funniest were the kind of crazy and absurd moments in the beginning with the dirtbag academics. I was kind of missing that energy a little bit towards the end, even though the book's plot is supposedly thickening and escalating. 

Overall, a solidly written, satirical, and surprisingly emotional book. Not one of my standout favorites from the last year, but definitely a great choice if you want to read a smart takedown of the publishing industry and the stereotypical labels it places on Black authors.

I don't read a lot of historical nonfiction, but I thought that the subject of this book is an important topic to read up on given the current invasion of Gaza and the brain-numbing discourse in the Western world surrounding Israel and Palestine.

Khalidi is very thorough and provides a hundred years of historical context, which helps deepen readers' understandings of more recent events. One of the ways that popular discourse seeks to misinform people about Israel/ Palestine is by simply ignoring the history leading up to this current moment-- mainly, complaining that Palestinians are too militant and are uninterested in diplomatic solutions, without providing the decades of history where the Israelis violently attacked Palestinians or how diplomatic solutions have almost always proven to be disadvantageous to Palestine. It's kind of slow to read and there are a lot of names, especially at first, but I guess that is to be expected from a history text.

The more recent chapters I found especially enlightening, about the First and Second Intifadas, as well as Israel's attacks on Lebanon. These events are relatively recent but seem to be either ignored or misunderstood by most Americans. In the later chapters, Khalidi's analysis on the state of Gaza and the rise of Hamas are particularly relevant, and they provide a more complex picture on why a religious fundamentalist militant group would gain power. (In large part, because of the failure of other more moderate political groups.) 

I also enjoyed Khalidi's own personal and family stories about the events of the book. Khalidi personally witnessed some of these historical events, such as the bombing of Lebanon, and he at some points advised Palestinian leaders in the diplomatic process. His anecdotes about his experiences and the various personalities involved help bring the historical narrative down to a human level. 

This book is of course a heavy read, but I appreciated Khalidi's thorough research, clear writing, personal anecdotes, and overall, an ending that insists that another way is possible.

I (a Formula One fan) finally caved and read a sports romance, one that is apparently Tiktok- famous. If you just want an audiobook to consume while simultaneously cooking and scrolling through your feed, you could do far worse, but IMO it delivers as neither a F1 book or a romance. The writing is unsubtle and cringy, the characters feel like collections of tropes, the romance is underbaked, and worse (to me), it captures little of the real drama of F1 off and on track.

Maya is a 23 year old recent college graduate who has always felt overshadowed by her brother Santi, a rising star driver in Formula One. Since she doesn’t have a job lined up, Santi asks her to accompany him around the world as he competes in a year’s worth of races, and she plans to make travel vlogs during the season. Santi has just been signed for the prestigious Bandini team. Unfortunately, he will be paired as teammates with Noah, a 30 year old American driver who has won multiple championships and has resented Santi since the two crashed years ago in an accident that cost Noah a world title. Despite the bad blood between Santi and Noah, Maya and Noah immediately start objectifying each other– I mean, they fall in love! They basically ogle each other for 300 pages, resist getting together because of Noah’s emotionally unavailable fuckboy tendencies, and then insist that they can’t go public with their relationship because of the “rivalry” between Noah and Santi. (Which, at this point, has cooled to the status of functional coworkers.) Basically, exactly what you would expect, in far too many words.

Story wise, the pacing of this book drove (haha!) me bonkers. The first few chapters is setup– Santi and Noah are rivals; Noah and Maya are obsessed with each other but can’t get together because of various reasons. After that, very little actually happens. Noah and Santi race with the other 2 driver characters who have names, Maya films travel vlogs or driver interviews, Noah and Maya think about how much they’d like to have sex, Noah annoys Maya and Maya tries not to let on how much she finds the whole thing inexplicably hot. It gets old, very fast.

Despite the book’s length, I felt like the romance plot didn’t really develop in a compelling way. Maya and Noah’s “relationship” goes from zero to sixty faster than an F1 car with some classic “instalust.” Upon meeting, they both think at extreme length about how sexy they find the other. These are just excerpts of longer chunks of text:

 

Most people in my life LOVED this book. Someone I knew put it in their gender studies thesis. I liked it and really loved some parts of it, but I felt a little let down by it in other places. Perhaps this is the tragic fate of every book that arrives with a ton of hype– it’ll invariably let some people down.

The novel is split into three parts, following the coming of age of Little Dog, a Vietnamese American boy who grows up in poverty with his refugee mother and grandmother in Hartford. The first section of the book follows Little Dog’s childhood, interspersed with stories of his mother and grandmother’s lives. Some of the writing is quite beautiful and quotable, especially as Little Dog struggles to understand his often enigmatic and harsh mother. At times, though, I couldn’t help but compare it to other books/ story collections with poetic writing about intergenerational trauma like Luster by Raven Leilani or Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So. Maybe I’ve been reading too many Asian/ POC trauma books, but some of the writing about migration and family history felt a bit trite. (Like using monarch butterfly migration as an analogy for… migration?) Some parts also confused me, like one scene that interweaves flashbacks of Little Dog’s grandmother’s story with a seemingly unrelated, rather gruesome scene of a bunch of guys eating the brains of a monkey. 

To me, the second part read the strongest. It follows a teenage Little Dog and his starcrossed relationship with Trevor, an older white boy he meets while working at a tobacco farm. Here, the book is the most grounded, relaying rich sensory descriptions of Little Dog and Trevor’s temporarily idyllic summer and alternating moments of tenderness and cruelty between them. I found Little Dog’s relationship with Trevor to be the most compelling. Through their relationship, Vuong explores masculinity, coming of age, sexuality, and desire with eloquent and fresh-feeling prose. These were the parts I kept coming back to with a pencil to underline. He also captures the bleakness of life in the Northeast, especially for people like Trevor and Little Dog, who struggle with poverty and complicated or abusive relationships with their families. While readers may not necessarily agree with the choices that Trevor or Little Dog make, they still feel very human and understandable. 

The third part of the book returns to Little Dog as a young man, a burgeoning writer who has left Hartford for New York City but is still tied to the tragic ends of the people he left behind. This section again felt a bit uneven in writing quality. I enjoyed reading about Little Dog’s exploration of creative writing and its limited power, as well as the book’s continued discussion of familial memory and addiction. The writing kind of goes off the deep end in some parts, slipping into a poetic style that some people might like, but I found it a bit confusing and a detraction from the novel’s story. There are a couple extended metaphors, like one about a table that may or may not exist, that just made me throw up my hands and hope it wasn’t important.

Although this novel is billed as a story about refugee families, I think the strongest parts of it were actually the relationship subplot in the second act, and the novel’s following thoughts on masculinity, sexuality, and desire. I’ve found much stronger work about migration and its intergenerational impacts in other works, and at times I felt like Vuong wanted to write a queer coming of age novel but got pushed into making the family relationships a bigger part of the story.

From a pacing and character perspective, the book is mostly character driven, made of often nonlinear vignettes. Some of them felt a bit random at times, to be honest. As a narrator, Little Dog is not perhaps the strongest character, but I still enjoyed much of his insights. I also didn’t feel like I got much of a sense of his mother as a character, even though she is supposed to be the center and purpose of the novel. She does come across as a complex character who cares about her son in her own, occasionally misguided way, but I felt like her relationship with Little Dog didn’t feel as rich as the relationship between Little Dog and Trevor. Perhaps this is because our parents are always a bit incomprehensible to us, but I was a bit let down in this regard.

Overall, I’d still recommend this book, though with a few caveats. Some parts of it are really strong verbal gut punches, but other parts, especially the more abstract poetic ones, seem like a distraction from the actual storyline. However, I did enjoy its wrestling with topics like addiction, complicated family dynamics, and sexuality with nuance and grace.

 

 <i>“We are all vultures, and some of us– and I mean Athena, here– are simply better at finding the juiciest morsels of a story, at ripping through bone and gristle to the tender bleeding heart and putting all the gore on display.” (106)</i>

Yellowface is a witty and emotionally punchy thrill ride that satirizes race and the publishing industry, though in my opinion it misses some opportunities for deeper critique by going after low-hanging fruit. I’d definitely recommend this book for fans of fast-paced satires of media tropes and funny Asian American literature, such as Disorientation and Interior Chinatown.

June, a struggling white author, has always envied her college friend Athena, a wildly popular Asian American writer. When Athena dies suddenly and June happens across her friend’s unpublished manuscript, she chooses to edit it and publish it as her own work under the ethnically ambiguous name “Juniper Song.” Although she finally gets the acclaim and weighty advance she hoped for, she grows paranoid that others will discover her secret and becomes determined to do whatever it takes to stay at the top.

Although I expected to dislike Yellowface after being rather let down by Kuang’s very hyped Babel, I think this new novel is an improvement on Babel in a couple ways. I found Babel to be a bit emotionally flat, more interested in seeing its characters as metaphors than real people with faults and quirks. As a consequence, the characters’ relationships in Babel felt disengaging, and the characters almost all fell into simplistic good or evil categories.

 

In contrast, Yellowface definitely delivers much more emotional substance in terms of its characters and relationships, especially in the relationship between June and Athena. They have a very realistic distant sort-of-friendship, in which June feels insecure because of Athena’s success and cannot see (when readers can) that Athena herself is also lonely and has her own struggles that peek past her polished exterior. 

In part because of the first person narration, the writing carries a distinct voice and delivers fairly often on the humor. Some of the lines felt a little too on the nose or “telling,” which can undermine some of the more emotionally complex or politically charged scenes. (In an unfortunate callback to Babel, another character basically spells out the messages and themes of the story at the very end.) Overall, the style is relatively forgivable given that the book is intended to be satirical.

While I felt that Babel made its heroes and villains too simplistic, I think Athena in particular represents a very compelling complex character– both genuinely affectionate and casually cruel, talented but also a difficult person to love. I don’t really agree with reviewers who read Athena as an insert for Kuang and June as a way to paint Kuang’s haters in a bad light, since many of the critiques that June and other characters have of Athena are valid criticisms. (Namely, her pretentiousness and penchant for turning other people’s personal trauma into profitable work.) Crucially, both Athena and June feel like fleshed out characters with their own idiosyncrasies, not just metaphors for one idea or another.

June usually strikes a balance of being both awful and sympathetic, but her characterization can come across as inconsistent. Her professional anxieties and love of writing feel relatable, and some of the book’s best prose describes her spiraling emotional state and her genuine love for fiction writing. At times, though, I found her characterization and motivations to be a bit unclear. When she first gets the idea to steal Athena’s draft, she knows what she’s doing is wrong and a bit mean-spirited, seeing it as her own form of vengeance upon Athena. However, at other points June flip-flops and feels that she had good intent from the start, but things merely got out of hand, a similar mentality to Evan in Dear Evan Hansen. I think this contradiction could have been done well to show how June’s ill intent lurked beneath her more benevolent excuses of finishing and publishing the draft as a “writing exercise” or “homage” to Athena. However, while Kuang’s narration of June is biting and often funny, it is not emotionally subtle enough to achieve something this layered, which is why to me June felt a little inconsistent.

For me, it would have felt more effective for June to start out claiming her positive intent for finishing the draft and slowly getting tempted into taking her ruse farther once she gets a taste of the glamor and success she’s always wanted. June’s claims of innocence and naivete, on a meta level, could serve as commentary for the way that white women often use their assumed innocence to avoid taking accountability for harm, and that good intent does not excuse harmful behavior.

I did appreciate the satirical look into the publishing industry. Kuang takes aim at tokenism, the ineffectiveness of cancel culture to hold celebrities accountable, and the way that mainstream books often flatten complex social critiques to make them palatable for white readers. The book also wrestles with some very thorny issues that do not have clear answers, such as who is “allowed” to tell certain stories or the ethics of turning someone else’s trauma into fiction.

However, I think that Kuang missed a couple of opportunities to make the critiques of publishing more engaging. For one, a lot of this book is spent on social media drama instead of the behind-the-scenes publishing industry machinations, which I found more interesting. Other critics who are writers themselves (such as youtuber withcindy) took issue with the book for portraying publishing as largely meritocratic– June and Athena’s manuscript instantly becomes a hit because of its writing quality, even though it’s seemingly from an unsuccessful and relatively unknown author without a publisher or good agent. I also think that the book could have added to the complex dynamic between Athena and June by showing how big of an advantage class is to being an author. 

Additionally, while you are not supposed to agree with June’s assertions that “diversity” is an unfair advantage in publishing, you rarely see anything on page to suggest the contrary until June is confronted by an Asian American character at the very end of the book, who talks about how hard it is to be Asian or nonwhite in publishing. Instead, Kuang could have put moments in the book to show that nonwhiteness or queerness are disadvantages in publishing that the reader can see, but that June herself may downplay or not recognize. Or perhaps because of her racial ambiguity, other people begin to treat her with anti-Asian microaggressions. These would have served as more natural ways to get across the same themes. I also think the book falls into the trap that many (East) Asian American novels get into in hyperfocusing on the disparities between (often middle class to wealthy) East Asians and  whites, without regard for other less privileged Asian Americans or non-Asian minorities. Of course, there’s only a limited amount of issues that one novel can cover, but it would have been interesting to examine the publishing landscape for working class Asians, Asians with darker skin, and/or non Asian minorities, whose issues would likely give some perspective to June’s grievances against Athena.

While I feel that Yellowface missed some opportunities that would take it from merely a good book to a great one, it is still an entertaining, fast-paced ride with complex characters and thorny subjects.