PositiveChicago Review of BooksHalf grief manifesto and half satirical commentary on the woo-woo influencer scene, sprinkled with humor and luxurious prose. Lola begins and ends her year of grief with the feeling that this was not how she thought her life was going to turn out. But by the time year’s end rolls around again, becoming the person she is meant to be is a distraction in itself; she is always coming of age.
PositiveChicago Review of BooksPlunges into the weirdness of underworld mythologies. Babel brings sarcastic footnotes, but Katabasis offers page-long treatises interspersed within chapters offering summaries of hell, the existing scholarship from past underworld sojourners, or sources that imply our protagonists have missed something critical. It’s a more whimsical style of worldbuilding...but I welcome it nonetheless ... The fun of Katabasis’ underworld mythos lies in deciding everything is true, cobbling together details in a way that is sketchy and imprecise ...
MixedChicago Review of BooksOkorafor has a lot to offer outside its story-within-a-story structure ... There’s rising action that builds but no release. But by the end, the explosion I felt like I was promised became a balloon leaking air. It’s not a dealbreaker, but it left me pawing at the back of the book, wondering if I had flipped past the final chapter.
R. F. Kuang
PositiveChicago Review of BooksDark ... Yellowface reads quickly and much faster than anything she has ever written ... Has two missions—pushing cultural exploitation to its fictional limits and satirizing the state of the publishing industry in an internet era. Sometimes, the novel sacrifices the first mission for the second and becomes too obsessed with the online lives of books and authordom. But where it shines is Kuang’s darkly witty tone, critiques of publishing and cultural exploitation, and the all-consuming nature of internet personas.
