Fetishized - book review

Fetishized - Book Review
by Ricardo Santiago Soto, MBA

RICARDO REVIEWS

Fetishized: A reckoning with yellow fever, feminism, and beauty, by Kaila Yu (Crown Publishing, 2025)

Nonfiction author, Kaila Yu, BA in economics at UCLA, brings her journalism, and personal experiences to expose her male focused world. The author details her invisible life as someone who did not receive male attention. Yu's memory includes her father ignoring her, while growing up even with good grades and attempts to be enthusiastic. Throughout the book Yu includes detailed examples of her dating lifestyle, which included her first kiss, and being shy about it all. Kaila confesses how the book, Memoirs of a Geisha, made her feel empowered through the value of being beautiful as a winning outcome causing her to meet men arranged by a female friend. The author uses her new found knowledge with a book to try out what she learned to establish experiences as entries. Kaila was very good at becoming a geisha, due to simple makeup, as well as, flirtation through the art of eye contact. Yu sees the value men place on women of beauty for sex as a misconception and theme running throughout her life. You will want to add this book to your Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2021), Crying in H Mart (2023), as well as, The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir (2017).

5 out of 5 stars