Alwynne's Reviews > Rouge

Mona Awad’s labelled Rouge the “twisted, culty sister to Bunny.” Her hauntingly gothic story draws on sources that range from fairy tales to Egyptian mythology. Mirabelle – Mira to her friends and Belle to her family - seems settled in Montreal. She has a steady job in a local dress shop and finds solace in watching skincare videos. Her spare time is taken up with obsessively recreating their rigid regimes which hold out the promise of someday achieving facial perfection. But then her mother dies in strange circumstances. So, Mira travels back to her mother’s home in La Jolla where she receives an unexpected invite to an exclusive, opulent spa La Maison de Méduse whose clandestine operations mask a horrific secret.

Like earlier writings, Awad’s tale of desire and transformation mines her own life, here she returns to an exploration of physical self-loathing and the ways in which women’s self-worth is too often tied to the pursuit of impossible standards of beauty. Mira or Belle is dual heritage, like Awad her mother was white, her father Egyptian. Growing up Belle couldn’t see herself reflected in the people around her, increasingly desperate to resemble her achingly glamorous mother whose “skin is as white as snow” rather than be continually compared to her “swarthy” father. It’s a scenario that conjures comments Awad’s made about her own background and the various forms of racism she’s personally experienced - particularly acute in the period after 9/11.

Awad was also inspired by the rise of UK skinfluencers who command billions of views on platforms like TikTok - with skincare products fast overtaking purchases of conventional makeup. Beauty gurus whose soaring popularity is fuelled in part by narcissism, envy or feelings of inadequacy that, it seems, might be addressed by finding just the right combination of Tretinoin and Korean snail extracts. Awad’s fluid, nightmarish narrative has a distinctly visual, cinematic flavour in keeping with its central themes: carefully-conceived colour palettes and elaborate settings abound, with here and there dashes of Hitchcock in his Vertigo era spliced with early Argento while vivid echoes of Cocteau’s La Belle et La Bête mingle with The Wizard of Oz. And the final, frenzied revelations about the spa’s exclusive treatments are pure Cronenberg. Awad also incorporates film star Tom Cruise who has a pivotal, gloriously perverse role in Belle’s story. What brings all of these elements together is Awad’s underlying examination of the intricate bonds formed between mothers and daughters, and the challenging, conflicting emotions that may accompany grief and sudden loss. Although I thought there were times when this faltered and it didn’t always feel as satisfyingly complex as All’s Well, it was still an immensely intriguing, consistently gripping read.

Thanks to Edelweiss and publisher Marysue Rucci Books/Simon & Schuster

rating: 3.5