How far would you go for external beauty? A slow starting novel feeling like it’s just going to be filled with pretentious characters, this is a story of a young woman and former piano prodigy who starts to work for Holistik, a new type of beauty spa trying new experimental procedures, including on their own staff. Trigger warning if you are disturbed by skinny culture and the beauty obsessed, that is in the forefront of this novel but it twists that obsession into a horror that takes a look into the Eurocentrism of beauty standards. It took me a few chapters to really start to enjoy this book, like maybe 80 pages in, but did enjoy where the plot was going. Definitely a story more for people who prefer plot development and execution over character development; even with a slow start, stay hooked for the dark turn, the innovative plot and the smart and interesting writing. I believe this deserves more than three stars but not sure if it’s quite at four stars for me, likely falls in between

NATURAL BEAUTY
Ling Ling Huang

This book feels like pulled skin, claustrophobic conversations, and creatures that only existed in your mind, until now.

It’s a horror book that feels like a mix between literary fiction and sci-fi. It comes out tomorrow and I think it will appeal to the right type of reader.

Are you that reader?

Our main character looking for both the warmth and the cold that comes from a family starts working at an extreme beauty store in New York City. She soon becomes enveloped in something that gives her a new sense of purpose. We watch as slowly she begins to lose herself. Becoming someone and something else entirely.

I enjoyed my time reading NATURAL BEAUTY but it wasn’t pleasant. At times, it reads very romantic, almost pretty, and then it curves and morphs into something hideous, nearly unrecognizable. Some of the concepts and passages will get under your skin and some of the themes explored will trigger you.

NATURAL BEAUTY is visceral, and it cuts a little. Huang is a new voice, and it feels like we’ve been dancing around subjects she makes clear and plain. Her new piece of fiction is about all the horrible things we allow in the name of perfection, the violations we concede to that happen every day and the dissociation required to exist.

It’s as terrifying as everyday life.

NATURAL BEAUTY has already been optioned as a tv series. Get a jump and read it first.

Get your pre-order in because this book is coming tomorrow, April 4, 2023!

Thanks to Netgalley, PENGUIN GROUP Dutton, Dutton, and Penguin Random House Audio for the advanced copies.

NATURAL BEAUTY…⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I can admit when I'm wrong, and boy was I wrong when I thought "eh" just one chapter into this book -- I was a little thrown by the author's choice to drop us straight into the narrative, and I worried that the novel's pacing would falter. WRONG. Instead, NATURAL BEAUTY picked up steam like a freight train, and it became increasingly impossible for me to put it down. What a stunning, sly debut that interrogates our cultural obsession with beauty, wealth, and femininity and how those ideals intersect with white supremacy. A seductive, totally mesmerizing novel that paradoxically unraveled with slow purpose at a breakneck speed. A must read book, for sure!

Sly, surprising, and razor-sharp, Natural Beauty follows a young musician into an elite, beauty-obsessed world where perfection comes at a staggering cost.

How far would you go to obtain unnatural beauty? This book examines the lengths the head of a business empire will go to give the weathly, beauty at their fingertips. In his mind, CEO Victor, sees beauty as art. The book carefully entertwines the two throughout. Our MFC, must descend into the depths of this world to find herself and overcome past trauma.

Thank you to @netgalley and @penguinusa for allowing me to review this ARC.

Holistik looked like it would solve the unnamed narrator's problems. After all, the beauty and wellness company would pay her well, allowing her to pay for her parent's medical care. It quickly becomes apparent, at least the reader, that not all is well, that there's something sinister afoot. Her relationship with Helen, the niece of the owner, blossoms after she gives Helen piano lessons but then Helen confides things that, well, no spoilers. Race, class, body shaming, beauty standards- all are part of this tale which mixes horror and a touch of satire. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC. For fans of literary fiction with a tilt.

An accomplished debut novel which questions and warps ideas of beauty. wellness, the fixed notion of the self and how far we go to assimilate into a different culture and forget ourselves. It is tender yet heart-wrenching while completely working well within the genre of body horror and dystopia. I did sometimes feel the descriptions were either overly explicit or in some places too subtle, and the balance was still being negotiated throughout the novel.

I’ve really been a roll lately with choosing some really great reads, and this was just the newest addition to a slew of incredible 5-star books

<i>Natural Beauty</i> is a stunningly unique story following our Asian-American narrator, a former prodigious musician, who suddenly accepts a job at a sketchy new beauty company - the way this story was constructed was beautiful and brilliant, as we learn about her past and why she quit music, this beauty company becomes more and more sinister. It blends coming-of-age literary fiction with humor and horror, and Huang, herself a trained pianist, adds a personal touch to the story. the writing is SO visual, this absolutely needs to be adapted into a movie.

How far would you go for perfection? For a former piano prodigy, the sudden glow-up she receives from her new job at Holistik, a new-agey, luxury brand dedicated to all things beauty, is an added bonus for what she really needs - money. A much-appreciated added bonus.

A horror story based in the world of beauty is hardly new ground, but Huang exhibits a deftness with verisimilitude that keeps even the goriest parts grounded in the plausible. Even as the plot rocketed towards its inevitable, ghastly end, I still wondered if some of these procedures could still be worth it.

The ending was a bit bleaker than I’d have liked, but this is an impressive debut that seems destined to make the jump to the big screen - although I’m not sure I have the stomach for it!

Read if you: keep up on all the latest beauty trends, have rolled your eyes at Goop, don’t have a weak stomach, know you Bach from your Beethoven

"At Holistik , they teach me what I need to be afraid of to become beautiful."

For centuries women have endured weird, expensive, and occasionally painful treatments and procedures in their search for beauty.

And, frequently we never even question what we put in our bodies or rub on our skin . . . as long as it results in a flawless complexion, and longer eyelashes.

Huang's young narrator needs cash fast, so she begins working at Holistik, a high-end retailer of natural beauty products. The store wants their representatives to look their best, so the salesgirls are required to sample the wares.

"There is no longer any way to deny it. I am becoming my best self."

But, soon it becomes apparent that the owners of this beauty business have some pretty ugly plans for their employees, and the buying public.

There's a wonderfully creepy 'Stepford Wives' vibe to this one. The author kept me guessing, AND turning the pages. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm late for my bird poop facial. I bet you won't even recognize the new me!

This is a story about how far people will go for external beauty. The narrator of the story is a piano prodigy. Her parents, who immigrated from China, are both strong piano players but want a different life for their daughter in the United States. But she insists on learning piano, and quickly shows her skill. She is offered the chance to study at an elite music school, and seems on the way to a promising career. But then her parents are in a serious accident that leaves them institutionalized. And the narrator gives up her dream.

At first, she works as a dishwasher. But then she is offered a job working at Holistik, an elite health and beauty store known for its unusual and effective treatments and supplements. The narrator’s new job comes not just with a steady pay check, but access to Holistik’s products. She soon sees her appearance changing, just as she finds herself drawn into the orbit of Helen, the niece of Holistik’s founder. The deeper she goes into this new world, the more she starts to notice unusual things happening to her and those that she comes into contact with — and begins to wonder what lurks beneath Holistik and its owners’ beautiful surface.

This was an intriguing book. It offered interesting insights into the connections between beauty, belonging, and identity. For the narrator, the attraction of Holistik seemed to be more about the access it gave her to the worlds and people that had long felt out of reach, back to the days when she saw how her parents were treated and when she had to entertain wealthy benefactors of her music school. Her experience with Holistik intersected with her experience as the child of immigrants. Having often felt out of place and rejected by her peers, the appeal of belonging — being welcomed by Holistik, Helen, and others and finding society at large seeming to embrace her as her appearance changed — was powerful enough for the narrator to ignore, and sometimes even consciously accept, the many troubling signs that something was amiss. This was a thought-provoking read from a powerful new voice.

Highly recommended!

Natural Beauty is a deeply disturbing and satirical look at the beauty industry, and it delivered on all fronts. What started out as an eerie, slowly creeping premise ended with an absolutely wild revelation, and an intense, horrific chain of events.

Our unnamed protagonist is a former a piano prodigy, working as a dishwasher in New York City. She lives in a dingy basement with less than desirable roommates, and is barely able to make ends meet. Previously, she had spent her childhood studying piano with her parents, who made their living offering piano lessons in New Jersey, after fleeing China during the Culture Revolution. One day, our protagonist is offered a scholarship at The Conservatory, a renowned musical institute, where she spends the next eight years studying and refining her skill. But on the evening of her final recital, a terrible tragedy befalls her parents, and her life is thrown off course.

Now, with the pressures of financially supporting her parents’ 24 hour care facility, she accepts a job at a high-end beauty store. Holistik offers beauty and wellness to it’s wealthy patrons, and the store is filled with light haired, fair skinned, female employees who all represent a very similar western standard of beauty. Soon, our protagonist is taking multiple supplements, swimming in creams and dripping in serums; all required of her as a Holistik employee. Her eyelashes are growing, her legs are lengthening, her hair is lightening, and she realizes all too late that her natural features are no longer distinguishable. As she continues down the rabbit hole and spends more time at Holistik, she starts to discover the terrifying truth about this company and it’s products.

This story, was so SO mesmerizing. The author painted Holistik so clearly, and the descriptions of these absolutely absurd procedures and products were equally funny and horrifying. There is an absolutely tremendous amount of imagination and inventiveness that went into this story. The horror aspect was spectacularly written, with parts that were so grotesque I had to stretch out my face afterwards from the scrunched up “ew” face that I was constantly making. This was dark, hilarious, terrifying and disturbing, laced with beautiful writing and I absolutely loved it.

In Natural Beauty, our unnamed narrator (which becomes a more and more interesting choice the further into the story we delve is a former musician of formidable talent, who has abandoned her passion for the piano after her beloved parents are in a terrible accident. The story opens as she is struggling in NYC, living in a cruddy basement apartment with crappy roommates, barely eking out a living, let alone earning enough money to pay for her parent's rehab facility. She is then offered the opportunity to work at Holistik, a boutique selling wildly coveted, expensive--and perhaps experimental-- products and services to beauty, age, and wellness-obsessed celebrities. The story is a beautiful meditation on grief, and family, and beauty itself. It skewers the cult of beauty in a surreal and I might even say satirical way also it feels utterly, gorgeously sincere. The writing is lyrical but it doesn’t veer purple. And the story is at turns beautiful and horribly grotesque and very, very sad. If you like the imaginative strangeness of Mona Awad’s books, the crusty, the bodily grossness of Otessa Moshfegh, or if you enjoyed the weirdness and WTFery of A Touch of Jen by Beth Morgan then you may dig this one. Magical realism, alternate reality, speculative fiction? I don't know what you call these stories, but if you gravitate toward books like this, Natural Beauty will be a favorite.

The author's take on self-care and skincare delivered as promise, but this reader found the unexpected sexual content (and the nature of that content) deeply disturbing.

You know I read a lot of own voices these days. Most of that is Asian and Asian American literature. I'm very unapologetic about it. I find it's mostly historical fiction in the form of leaving a war torn country or contemporary romance, but sometimes it surprises you. Sometimes it's this.

I don't like straight horror. I've only enjoyed two of Stephen King's books. Do with that what you will. I loved every second of this. As a woman that grew up in the celebrity obsessed culture of the United States that has since moved to Los Angeles, this depiction of the beauty industry hits quite close to home. What is in your beauty products? Do you care? How much will you pay to be young and beautiful?

A gorgeous debut. I will be reading the author's next works. Fun fact, my friend Bea met Ling Ling at a wedding and said she was lovely, if that helps you pick the book up at all.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher.

I basically read this in one sitting, not just because it is on the shorter side, but because I needed to know what was going to happen. And oh boy, did things happen. A young, cash starved Chinese American woman takes a job at a very high end natural skincare story called Holistik. Her parents are in a long term health care facility due to an accident, and our narrator has given up her dreams of becoming a professional pianist to take care of them. Nothing about her life is clean until Holistik comes along and recruits her, with its white washed walls (and employees).

A dark tale about the lengths we will go to for beauty and what beauty even is, this is a great read.

After suffering a family tragedy, a once promising pianist leaves the acclaimed conservatory she's been attending and starts to work minimum wage jobs. She's then recruited to work at the top beauty and wellness store Holistik where she's given thousands of dollars worth of free products that beautify from the inside out. But when things start to go a little too far, she starts to question what it's all worth and how far she will go. Ling Ling Huang's satirical debut explores consumerism, self-worth, race, and identity in a compelling way that makes it hard to put down.

I went into this one blindly and I would recommend that. I'm still processing the horror-esque turns it took. I almost wanted it to be longer because I wanted to know more about the background characters. Huang's book is unique and sucks you in.

3.5/5 stars - rounded down.

"Natural Beauty" takes readers down a deep dive into an alternate reality in NYC where Holistik Beauty, a supposedly all-natural beauty and health company on the forefront of scientific advancements, has taken over the market share of the industry. Told from the first person perspective of an unnamed narrator, we get to see as she's pulled into the alluring world of Holistik and begins her dangerous plummet down the metaphorical (and physical) rabbit hole. Author Ling Ling Huang has clearly put an extensive amount of thought and creativity into the supposed inventions and product breakthroughs that are signature to the company - from in-house silkworms that are called on-demand to weave employee garments, to remoras that suck out cheap Botox fillers from clients' skin, to the extensive and mysterious powders and formulas that both employees and customers take regularly.

Interwoven across the present are flashbacks to the narrator's past, to her humble upbringing as the child of Chinese immigrants who became piano teachers, her long-standing love of music and her innate talent at piano, and her introduction as a student at the Conservatory where she becomes a trained musician. Her life goes completely off-course after her parents suffer a terrible accident after one of her recitals, and she takes on a job as a dishwasher at a local diner in an attempt to cover their ongoing rehabilitation costs. She's given a chance to work at Holistik after a chance encounter, not knowing what exactly she's signed up for.

This novel read like a fever dream, one that brought to light weighty questions on identity and race, standards of beauty, and the intentions behind the health and wellness industry at present. I struggled at times to keep up with the events and characters that unfolded, especially given the complexity of the fictional world Huang created. It contrasted greatly with the poignant and emotional flashbacks to the narrator's childhood and her parents, however, which were touching moments that illustrated both their struggles but also the depth of love they had for each other. As someone who had a similar upbringing and background, I think these moments gave so much additional depth to our character and highlighted the motivations for many of her decisions and actions.

Thought-provoking, dark, and disturbing - this is not a novel to be read lightly.

Honestly, I didn’t know what to expect going into this book. The summary is just vague enough to intrigue you even more but doesn’t fully prepare you for how this book unfolds. Natural Beauty delves into the sinister world of beauty as self-care and self-worth—and what people will do to be their “perfect” selves.

Once, the unnamed narrator was a immensely talented pianist, a prodigy who had been training at the Conservatory for years. Then her parents suffer a debilitating accident, and she leaves her future behind to make money to pay for their care. At the restaurant where she works as a dishwasher, she’s discovered by Saje, who invites her to work for Holistik, her famous beauty store that people would kill to work for. There, the narrator is exposed to the extreme lengths people would go to in order to be beautiful—and the dangers underlying the price of beauty.

The way this book unfolds was fascinating; I could never look away, even when I was disturbed by the events that were happening. It’s definitely one that will stick with me for a while, and I’m definitely excited to see what this author writes next because I loved the writing. There’s something sticky about the narration that I just really enjoyed.

The character dynamics were also incredibly interesting. The narrator becomes enamored with Helen, the niece of Holistik’s owner Victor, and forms a terse bond with Lilith, Helen’s best friend and the manager of the Holistik storefront she works at. They’re the first friends she’s ever had, after years of being ridiculed and excluded at the Conservatory.

My favorite part of the book, though, was the narrator’s love for her parents and of music, particularly how the three of them bonded through the sharp emotions that music can evoke. Her parents are immigrants from China who fled in the wake of the Cultural Revolution as talented pianists. They eventually settled in the US as piano teachers, providing a frugal life for their daughter but one full of love.

I loved the passages describing her childhood, where her family didn’t have much but her parents found joy in the music they could produce and share together. Entering Holistik, a new world of mass wealth and privilege, was certainly a shock for the main character and remaining immersed in it for so long makes her forget the life she lived before, yet it’s clear that she can’t let go of the memories of love she has of her parents. The love lingers and remains, and was the strongest part of the book in my opinion.

Music itself serves as an analogy for beauty. Holistik’s whole concept of beauty is being perfect to a degree that isn’t natural yet will be shown as such. To Victor, there is no beauty in ugly things. However, the protagonist considers how there is beauty in what might not be conventionally beautiful, that dissonance and startling chords in pieces of music only enhance the beauty of the song itself.

Amidst all this, we’re introduced to the increasingly ridiculous beauty products and regimens that Holistik sells and provides. Beauty is presented as “self-care,” for the betterment of yourself. The people who work there are also required to partake in the daily supplements, and as time goes on, the protagonist is transformed into something new. It’s horrifying to see everything about her stripped away by Holistik; we’re never told the narrator’s actual name, only that it means “lotus,” and even that is taken away as Saje suggests she takes on a name that customers would feel more comfortable seeing.

To me, it was a bit ambiguous as to whether she actually enjoys this new life or even convinced by it. At times, the narration reads like she’s in a daze, just floating through her daily life. She’s certainly in love with Helen, the most beautiful person she’s ever met, and it’s stated multiple times that she’s just trying to make money to pay for her parents’ care facility. Her partaking in the Holistik felt more passive, which provides another layer to the slowly creeping-in horrors of the book.

Overall, I really enjoyed this story and will be haunted by it for a while longer. I loved the writing and how the character relationships were depicted, as well as the descriptions of music. I wouldn’t recommend this book if you’re not too into horror, but otherwise, if you’re intrigued by a mystical world of beauty as self-care and the gross lengths that people would go to to be beautiful, you should definitely pick up Natural Beauty.

The nameless protagonist was once a piano prodigy, until a family tragedy left her broken and broke. Landing a job at the prestigious cosmetics company Holistik might be just the break she needs to put her life back together. She can take pride in selling women bleeding-edge wellness treatments, earn a good living, and receive a personalized beauty regimen that is literally transformative. But the deeper she falls under Holistik's spell (and that of its founder's niece, Helen), the creepier it gets. Huang wraps a nauseating veneer of body horror around a cutting polemic about toxic beauty standards.