"Babel" may well be better than this book. In "Yellowface" Kuang is writing about an industry she thinks she knows better than she does.

This smart review on Open Letters deals with an issue too complex to take on in my review: the novel faults racial tokenism while, at the same time, her publisher has played up its author's Chinese-American background:

https://openlettersreview.com/posts/yellowface-by-rf-kuang-and-the-late-americans-by-brandon-taylor