Rouge by Mona Awad
Rachel @thelitlist_ reviewed the up and coming novel Rouge by Mona Awad for us! If you’re interested in reading advanced copies of fiction and non-fiction in exchange for a review like this then please get in touch with Chloe - shop@unitybooksauckland.co.nz.
From the critically acclaimed author of Bunny comes a horror-tinted, gothic fairy tale about a lonely dress shop clerk whose mother’s unexpected death sends her down a treacherous path in pursuit of youth and beauty. Can she escape her mother’s fate—and find a connection that is more than skin deep?
It’s a dreamy mirage of beauty wrapped tightly within the tentacles of gothic horror.
Roll out the ‘Rouge’ carpet y’all.
Now, I still haven’t read Bunny by Mona Awad but given that the hype that book received at the time, I expected nothing less from Awad’s latest. This is a novel about a shop clerk, Belle, obsessed with everything skin – her mother Noelle mysteriously dies, and Belle finds herself dealing with her mother’s debts and the depths of La Maison de Meduse (a beauty culty kinda spa) to which her mother was devoted to.
Working in the beauty industry myself, every page ironically had me hooked – from magical elixir’s to layering a Radiance Rescue Exfoliating Dewtopia, White Pearl Pigment Perfector, Brightening Caviar to chemical exfoliants, this is a world I am all too familiar with. I’m the kinda girl who researches and geeks out reading articles from Into The Gloss on the latest additions to an editor’s beauty cupboard, to the ingredients list on products and translating them into CosDNA, so I get it. It’s a ritualistic routine that most of us perform on the daily within the privacy of our own homes, lathering ourselves in creams and serums and oils / it’s the ideal, the ‘glow’ and the quest for beauty that cements this novel as the Snow-White meets Eyes Wide Shut horror-tinted fairytale that we all wanted.
Disney and the façade of the fairytale has instilled in us that the colour red is a representation of danger and anger (y’all remember Snow White’s apple), now cue* jellyfish and a strange woman in red. It’s a culture yearning for eternal beauty, a fate hidden within the Eurocentric standards we see today – as a South-East Asian, I’ve always felt like I’ve floated alongside this realm and never in it, where pale skin, expensive spa appointments and twenty-step skincare routines have been the norm and the aspirations to which one acquires through life, and all I’m craving is summer and a tan. Lols.
This deep-rooted trend in Asian cultures really does go skin deep – in many societies, dark skin has long been associated with rural poverty/ a sign of the working class whilst pale skin has been attributed to nobility and wealth. Supplement pills, Glutathione injections to accelerate ‘whitening’ processes, peels to skin-whitening creams. It’s a cultural doctrine that continues to exacerbate the consumerist population and the younger generation on the proliferation of skin colour and its meaning instilled by social institutions. Using this recipe, Awad takes huge risks in highlighting the dichotomous themes of a beauty world promising unique solutions with a dash of enchantment and colourism/ a device that Awad has executed brilliantly and honestly. It’s a beauty lover’s nightmare really.
A bad acid trip.
Like having an unsettling meal but you’re starving so you have it anyways.
The inspo behind this novel coincidentally spawned from Awad’s personal experience of lying on a table in a high-end spa and then wondering after the session ended as to where the exit was. Endless stone-coloured hallways. A coldness dipped in sinister moisturizing agents. Fear. Mazes. Discomfort. Terror. The latest beauty products are being pushed to the forefront of our screens by the latest YouTuber boasting its benefits and discount codes. ASMR unwrapping, swatches, the warning signs of acids, the soothing agents of ceramides. Oh, the perils of our unsettling fascinations with beauty.
Brilliant stagey names and Disney-like insidious delusions lurk on every page. Cursed mirrors, red shoes, haunted mannequins, and jellyfish; it’s like beauty slipping off a cliff into a horror that will leave you either in awe or suffering in recoil. The division between the dark side of beauty and envy and the cult-like nature of the beauty industry is thoroughly explored with sinister vigor. So too is that wonderful theme of the ‘mother-daughter relationship’ – to what extent is a mother’s demise and devotion to the ‘mirror’ intruding on inherited habits on one’s spawn? An isolation felt. An interest in the melancholy of beauty but the essentialism it brings to one’s survival. Capitalism planting its veiled thick roots of objectification.
This novel is unapologetically absurd and complex – an aching novel about a young woman’s body being ravaged by the snappy ritualism’s of the beauty world. Warped in all its glory, Rouge is a fever dream that will have you riding the coattails of black humor and drowning within the glossy veneer of a tormented dystopia. In other words, believe the hype and run don’t walk to get this beauty.