"It is with heavy heart that I must admit defeat. The writing style of this book is just so very, very far from my preference for a nonfiction book, and the focus is shifted far enough away from the subjects that most interest me, that I'm not going to press on.

I want to stress that Susan La Flesche's story--indeed, the story of her whole family--is absolutely fascinating, and I would love to see a nice, fat book with even more details about everyone, from the Omaha chief who appointed her father his heir to her sister who chose to remain on Omaha land to raise children and teach. But I would also really--and I mean really--like to see such a book have end notes in it. Starita states that he chose not to use notes because they would disrupt the flow of the story, but it made me a tad suspicious to have no frame of reference every time he described Susan La Flesche's emotions. (Except for the first chapter, which he did let us know was sourced from a highly detailed account that La Flesche gave.)

Parts of the writing were also oddly repetitive: restating the obstacles that she had overcome so far, that she was equally comfortable with poetry readers and Omaha ceremonies (though I didn't read any examples of the latter), and that La Flesche "could not know" about conflicts happening concurrently at the national level. And several times a turn of phrase--like, "the half-blood Omaha and the full-blood Sioux"--would be used at the end of one paragraph and at the beginning of the following paragraph.

I have to admit, I was hoping for a lot more information about La Flesche's education growing up. What elements of traditional Omaha beliefs did her father permit the his children to learn? What was her time at the school in New Jersey like? There's plenty of textual evidence about how she fit in to white society, but were there ever moments when she stood out and stood up for her heritage? What did she think of attitudes towards American Indians playing out on the national stage? What did she think of her black classmates at Hampton? And what did a mid-to-late nineteenth century medical education consist of? I really was hoping for more information about medicine, particularly if there were any Omaha medical practices that La Flesche did approve of, or work with. And I wanted a more socially critical examination of her interactions with white America.

Even though the book didn't meet my expectations, the facts spoke for themselves: the details of white America's cruelty to the country's first inhabitants were as appalling as expected. And even the good-intentioned support of white people stung: the language used to praise La Fleshce is condescending in the extreme (I would have liked Starita to comment on this), and this behavior did seem to start impacting the way she wrote about her own people in letters to her family. I would have liked examples of ways that she preserved her Omaha heritage (as we are told she did), not just the ways she blended into white society.

And of course, shining through everything was La Flesche's brilliant resilience. I went into this book knowing that she overcame obstacles--but that didn't make it any less impressive to read about how she worked in correspondence with women she'd never met to scrape together the money to attend medical school, or how she graduated at the top of her class.

Like I said, I'm disappointed to be giving this up--but the ratio of "narrative" to "nonfiction", and literary flourishes to facts is far too high for my taste and comfort. If you like your history to read more like a story, you will love this book. If you, like me, occasionally try to vary your embarrassingly high fiction intake with distinctly differently-written nonfiction, this book probably won't be to your taste. If you have similar stylistic taste to me but are a better person than I am and are willing to push past style to read about this amazing woman and her family, I would love to hear your Cliffs Notes version. In the meantime, I will slink over to Wikipedia with my tail between my legs.


Quotes & Notes

37) "It is either civilization or extermination."
It may have been Joseph La Flesche and Big Elk's attitude, but that doesn't make it any less sad that a long-established way of life that wasn't European-based was not considered "civilization". It's not clear whether this thinking had been internalized by the "Young Men's Party" faction of the Omaha, or whether the use of "civilization" was used somewhat ironically in his sense. (It's also not clear whether this was Starita's encapsulation of a complex situation or something that someone said at the time. An end note might have settled that question...

55) As low as white America had stooped, I was still unpleasantly surprised to learn that a federal prosecutor tried to argue in 1879--after the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments--that the logic of Dred Scott ruling that denied citizenship to black people should be applied to American Indians. Fortunately (amazingly), the judge didn't buy it.

70) "Among the Indians, frustrated Senator Dawes once remarked, 'there is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilization.'"
Oh boo-hoo, you narrow-minded capitalist.

79) One of the coolest things about this book is the number of interesting women La Flesche bumped elbows with. This wasn't like royal Europe, where you had a handful of Queens surrounded mostly by male politicians. Alice Fletcher turned out to have a bad streak in the end, but she still campaigned on incredibly hard on behalf of the Omaha, with Susan La Flesche's brother at her side, and helped them sort out land allotments that, according to Starita, calmed the tribe members' fears that they would be shipped off to a reservation down south. The next two quotes cover other cool women:

114) "'Far from being a period when women physicians were an anomaly, the late nineteenth century witnessed a remarkable increase in their numbers. In Boston, the peak was reached in 1900 when women physicians accounted for 18.2 percent of the city's doctors."
Just to be clear, this wasn't the all-time peak. In 2014, were women.

126) "Susan and her classmates (including one from India, one from Syria, and another from Japan)..."
What! I want to read about all of them! I think I just need a more-factual-than-flowery book about women practicing medicine through the ages--that would probably hit the spot for me.


The views and opinions expressed in this review are my own and should not be construed as representing those of my company."

"I'm always drawn towards stories about plagiarism. You write 'em, I read 'em. And the ones I like best tend to be a little bit tongue-in-cheek and satirical, inviting you to see the world through the plagiarist's eyes. After all, they're not really bad people, are they? They see a story that needs telling, and they're the ones to tell it. So what if the story isn't theirs to tell in the first place?

And so Yellowface enters that arena with its own take on this eyebrow-raising topic. And right off the bat, I'm intrigued. June is an interesting plagiarist-protagonist. She starts off as a writer struggling for relevance, and that struggle is something we can all relate to. It's not as if she decides to become a plagiarist overnight. No, it's a slippery slope of small decisions, each one understandable on its own, that ultimately lands her in such an ignoble profession.

Once I started, I couldn't put it down. June's voice is as compelling as it is grotesque, and it's hard to look away from such self-inflicted catastrophe. You know this isn't going to turn out well, and yet she just keeps going. The best satires always elicit a lot of wincing, and that definitely happened here.

I don't mind telling you guys that this story made me uncomfortable. And I'm sure that is R.F. Kuang's intention. June isn't some crazy thief, at least not initially. Rather, she's drawn as this morally ambiguous, somewhat sympathetic character. In fact, from certain angles, she looks almost downright reasonable, making the best of what she's got. And this sly characterization leaves the reader both fascinated and uneasy, for we feel drawn towards June even though she is the villain of this tale. And that cognitive dissonance stays with us throughout.

The first half of the book was particularly strong for me because of that perfect balance between hero and antihero. There's a lot of subtlety that allows June to be both appealing and repulsive. However, once we get to June's book release and her subsequent guilt and justification, it does start to take on more and more of a crazed tinge, and as a result, lost a lot of the subtlety that made the first half so compelling for me.

There is a lot packed into this little story: racial commentary, inside look at being a writer and the publishing industry, internet trolling, cultural appropriation. And it's all done seamlessly. I have to applaud the author for both not being afraid to wade into these interesting topics, as well as saying something of substance about each of them.

What a fascinating story this turned out to be. Subversive and uncomfortable, it really drew me in and kept me glued to the pages. If you're looking for something that's both eminently readable and also leave you a lot to think about, this is it.

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