One of the things I miss most from bookselling is the joy of sharing a book that you love with other people.
I’m going to try to start writing occasional reviews here to share books I’ve truly enjoyed.
I just finished Mona Awad’s Rouge, and here’s the review I wrote for Goodreads:
We all know that (Disneyfication aside) fairytales are deeply scary stories.
They’re cautionary tales that warn of hidden consequences, the rot behind the allure.
Rouge opens on a scene where a young girl begs her mother to tell her a fairytale. The action is narrated by a wonderfully bitchy and deadpan narrator, the coziness undercut with sly asides and mentions of a strange figure in a mirror. Everything is off kilter. The mother is not very maternal and both she and the little girl are paying a little too much attention to the mirror.
(You too, should pay attention to the mirrors.)
Fast-forward 30 years or so, and the mother has just died in a tragic accident. The daughter, Mirabelle Nour, is a sales assistant in her late thirties at a high-end boutique in Montréal. She travels to California to set her estranged mother’s affairs in order.
But Mira is so avoidant that she spends a large portion of her mother’s funeral locked in a bathroom watching skincare videos on YouTube. She uses her (frankly exhausting-sounding) skincare rituals to fritter away time, and we begin to understand just how much she shares her mother’s obsession with capital b Beauty.
The Glow.
The Brightness.
The Envy.
They envied one another their very different looks.
Both of them scoffed at yet were intrigued by the other’s skincare routine.
Each believed the other to have an ideal form of beauty that they could never attain themselves.
Unless…?
First Noelle, then Mira, succumbs to the glamour of Rouge. A secret, exclusive, treatment center located behind the wrought-iron gates of a cliffside mansion.
(A glamour is a kind of spell, after all.)
We follow Mira as she embarks on a perilous personal Journey (wearing magical red shoes, of course) that involves glowing red jellyfish, eucalyptus-scented smoke, mirrors, weird ageless cultists, overly excited fizzy wine, and a level of forgetting things that I associate with ECT treatments.
She develops a nifty line in (apt, hilarious) malapropisms as her language disintegrates alongside her memory.
Mirabelle, Daughter of Noelle, is deeply imperiled yet oblivious.
What will become of her?
The New York Times may want us to think of Mona Awad as the natural heir to Margaret Atwood (Canadian, brilliant, wildly inventive, darkly hilarious) but you may find yourself thinking more of Angela Carter than of Atwood while reading Rouge.
Awad has spoken before about her love of fairytales, cult movies, and horror, and references to all of these abound here.
This means that like Bunny or All’s Well before it, Rouge isn’t easily categorized. It has a lot to say about mother-daughter rivalry, the noxiousness of the beauty industry (the brightening here is also a whitening), the ways in which cults operate (mystery, exclusivity, isolation, decadence), and the age-old and always empty promises of snake-oil salesmen.
That she can do all this in the form of a gothic fable that feels both timeless and of the moment is impressive, but all this with a layer of delicious satire on top?
I envy.
(No wait, I mean I enjoy.)
Very much.
Many thanks to Scribner and Net Galley for providing me with an e-ARC in exhcange for an honest review.
(Yes, I will be buying a physical copy of this, it’s a keeper.)