PanThe Cleveland Review of Books\"...the novel is a lackluster examination of plagiarism, privilege, and cultural appropriation that is too assured of its own righteousness; that fails, in its moral assertions and limp characterizations, to conclude anything besides the painstakingly obvious. With a contrived plot and colorless, cliché-ridden prose, Yellowface, which is billed as a \'razor sharp\' satire, offers remarkably little novelty and nuance into contested artistic territory ... Yellowface has, in effect, become what it sought to critique: a bestselling literary phenomenon, its success \'hinge[d] on factors that have nothing to do with the strength of its prose.\'\
Katherine Dunn
PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksToad’s modern sensibilities are revealed through its narrator. Dunn crafts an unsparing portrait of a woman who, while softened by isolation, was once more vicious and violent than pure victim: caring in one instance, cruelly dismissive the next. This is where Toad feels ahead of its time — and maybe ours as well ... With not much in her future worth anticipating, Sally wades through a hefty past. Her life unfolds in vivid but truncated flashbacks ... These loosely related vignettes are expounded upon with wry asides and little care for chronology ... Dunn’s writing is dynamic and propulsive, even if her subject matter — college-aged misfits dawdling about — has been thoroughly exhausted. Her didactic prose surpasses the spare, dispassionate style common among today’s novelists. One is never bored. Dunn is best inside the head of her characters, unleashing delightful screeds of detail ... While a compelling page-turner, the novel is unbalanced and hastily concluded. Had Dunn been given more time and an advance, Toad might’ve proven to be a very different book. Perhaps this dissatisfaction is to be expected from any posthumously published work resurrected from the archives, especially one that its writer had given up on.
