A twisted, hypnotic tale of horror about everlasting beauty, Rouge reminds me immensely of the film Suspiria (the 2018 re-imagined remake by Luca Guadagnino), both in its aesthetic (gothic, eerily beautiful) as well as narrative structure (a slow-burn mystery descends into full-blown hysteria). Mona Awad is known for creating an engrossing ambiance, and Rouge maintains that literary excellence with fusion of fairy tale imagery, film noir, Hollywood glam, and commentary on beauty standard.

While Rouge conjures up countless memorable vignettes (the cryptic cover art hits different once you know what it represents), and the writing is consistently visceral, at times even downright chilling (there's a recurring motif of words being replaced, seemingly by error, by similar-sounding words, which actually insinuate further subtext), the novel crumbles slightly when it comes to its closing act. By clearly defining certain events as reality, it loses the hazy ambiguity it has been constructing throughout (Is it all just a hallucination of its protagonist?), and makes questioning its logic that much more vulnerable (how can something so outrageous happen without alarming the neighborhood/police?), which dampen the effectiveness of the overall narrative.

Still, the vast majority of Rouge has me completely hooked in its dream logic world. Personally I find this title even more immersive comparing to her last effort, All's Well, which I already quite enjoyed. This really solidify Mona Awad as a must-read author—looking forward to the next one!

You'll never view your skin care regimen the same again

Also, Tom Cruise and jellyfish may creep you out after reading this.

What starts as a beauty industry horror story turns into a generational pain of mothers casting their own desires onto their daughters. To be beautiful is to be valuable and safe and wanted. Aren't those things all mothers want for their daughters? Mothers then project their own fears and weaknesses onto their daughters, thus creating a domino effect through the generations.

I loved all the descriptions of skin care products and perfumes. Some descriptions were so good I was pretty sure I knew which product she was lampooning. Then there was the use of colors. It might have been stretched a little far, but the indulgence in red, red, RED, circles through tedious and comes back around to appropriate and well suited.

What's most fascinating is Awad's use of language. It's simplistic and frank, while at the same time doesn't specifically say anything. It's a dance around an idea. Is Tom Cruise real? Was any of it real? And if it was real, to what extent?

I guess the moral of the story is "Mothers be kind to your daughters, and daughters be forgiving of your mothers."

Story: 5 stars
Character Development: 3 stars
Writing: 5 stars

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC of Rouge.
I wish I could say that this author totally works for me but this is my third book of her’s and none quite do it for me. Some of the objectives of the story were compelling, like the endless search for the perfect beauty regimen. The daily grind that people endure to find that cocktail of skin treatments for enduring and perfected beauty. This is told through a fairy tale retelling at the base of the story with a fever dream pushing the plot forward. I appreciated the use of these methods to show the ridiculousness of this constant drive for skin care that maintains a youthful glow and the lengths that people will go to for perpetual youth. My issue came about halfway through the story when it began to drag. There was a slowdown in the story and it started to feel tedious.
Overall, I think this book does what it sets out to do and does so in a very Mona Awad fashion. This will be perfection to some readers but I realize that her writing is a unique experience and more appreciated by others. Not my favorite because of my preference, not the writing or story.
#Rouge #Netgalley #SimonElement/MarysueRucciBooks

✨ Review ✨ Rouge by Mona Awad

Well this is a freaking wild ride of a book! I found it slow but enjoyable -- I couldn't read more than a few chapters at time, at least until I got to the last third of the book.

**NOTE** This has flashbacks back to the past that aren't marked and I'm betting this would be super confusing as an audiobook -- definitely recommend a physical or ebook copy so that you can flip back as well.**

Belle's mom dies and she ends up back in Southern California to tie up loose ends -- but things are kind of off -- broken mirrors, a house in semi-disrepair, she sold out of her shop she'd owned since Belle was younger and the new owner has completely changed the vibe. Belle's obsessed with skin care - layers and layers of creams and mists and oils and more, and she finds that maybe her mom was doing a lot of skin care too. She discovers a silver dress and red shoes that carry her off into the distance....

Saying more might mess up the experience, but it was a wild journey filled with skin care and a disconnect from reality and this world that was never quite clear. This is my first Mona Awad, but definitely sounds like her style from friends who've read her other books? I can't wait to read more of her work!

There's a lot going on here with beauty and expectations and our deepest desires. What would you give up to be beautiful and young-looking forever?

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Genre: literary fiction
Setting: Southern California
Reminds me of:
Pub Date: out now!

Read this if you like:
⭕️ skin care and/or discussions of beauty
⭕️ mannequins & dresses & shoes
⭕️ literary fiction that makes you wonder what's real

Thanks to Simon Element, S&S/ Marysue Rucci Books and #netgalley for an advanced e-copy of this book!

I loved how this book was twisted and weird yet also gothic and beautiful! It is rather satirical and provides thought provoking commentary on the beauty industry and skincare industry but is also gorgeously written. Highly recommend for fall!

𝘚𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘬 𝘏𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘵 is one of my favorite reads of the year so clearly I like weird books. I was all in on 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘐𝘯𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘖𝘳𝘲𝘶𝘪́𝘥𝘦𝘢 𝘋𝘪𝘷𝘪𝘯𝘢 and had no problem suspending disbelief. So after reading 𝗥𝗢𝗨𝗚𝗘, I think it's time for me to accept that I just don't get Mona Awad.

A dark, trippy look at the horrors of the beauty industry should be right up my alley but it took me more than a week to get through the 384 pages (meanwhile I finished 600+ pages of 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘊𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘯𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘞𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘳 in 3 days). Awad's writing is dreamy and surreal which I enjoyed but what's happening is so boring that it literally put me to sleep. I've read reviews that say the book is a Gothic twist on Snow White with shades of Hitchcock and The Wizard of Oz and Greek mythology. To me, it was an endless loop of lyrical but ultimately meaningless talk about jellyfish, rose petals and Tom Cruise. Maybe I'm just not smart enough to get the underlying message but I've decided I’m okay with that.

Thanks to Simon Element for the copy to review.

Surreal and can only be described as “very Mona Awad” which I love. I didn’t devour this as quickly as her other works BUT! Awad has such a fun and dark way of dealing with the liminal spaces she puts her character in and it was a lot of fun!

This book is like if your fever dream had a moral of the story. I wouldn't really go in expecting a plot, which is fine! But around the 50% mark I did have to sort of force myself to keep reading, partly because it felt like once you get there, why is there much more of the book left, though around 80-ish I got really into it again! Also I thought the narrator really added to the ambiance and nailed the tone of the book, but I am BEGGING audiobook narrators to stop actually whispering, it's so uncomfortable (but it's not terribly overused here, I just noticed it several times as I was finishing this one today)

Rouge is my first foray into Mona Awad's writing and it certainly will not be my last. Awad's writing is beautiful and fluid, flowing off the page.

Rouge is the story of Mirabelle (Belle) whose mother gifted her a fitting name, considering how much her mother thinks about beauty. Belle's mother's views on beauty, ultimately send her off on a path of beauty obsession after her mother's death.

As much as Rouge is a story of beauty, it's also a story of the complicated relationships between mothers and daughters. I've never read a novel that hit this nail on the head so squarely, portraying the often exacerbating complexity of both hating the woman your mother raised you to be and wanting desperately to be that woman.

The story feels a lot less important than the prose in Rouge. There's a Lynchian quality to it that I think will appeal to Awad's readers and fans of surreal fiction in a broader sense.

~thank you so much to netgalley & the publisher for gifting me with an advanced read copy and a finished copy of the book~

as always miss read hit it out of the park. there’s something about mona awad writing that it so mystical and alluring and this book is very evident of that.
overall story was so unique, trying to explain to people the plot of the book I was reading was so funny. most of the characters in rouge were very unlikable to me, but not in a negative way.

the relationship between mother and daughter was different in the way it was told but still strong, and emotional. I loved the flashback scenes during the “treatments” it felt like a great way to show the characters backstory along with her relationship with her mom.

this really felt like a fever dream at some points and it was so trippy. the subtle changing of words and it’s underlying meaning was so entertaining to me! I really loved it (ie “we spray and we spray and we spray and it’s lonely. Lovely, I mean”)

this felt like a great step in Mona’s writing career, and I think fans of her work are really going to enjoy this one.

Rouge has it all…it’s a psychological mind blower, with a bit of sorcery thrown in. Then add an unstable mother and daughter with serious facial dysmorphia, a treatment center dedicated to everlasting beauty, and you will not be able to look away!

When Belle’s mother dies suddenly, she must go back to Malibu from Canada where she lives now to bury her mother as well as settle her estate. Although they were not very close, they talked on the phone some.

What Belle had not realized was while sometimes speaking with her mother Noelle on the phone, she would not seem to be one hundred percent present in the conversation. She just chalked it up to her age and being lonely or busy with the clothes shop she co-owned. Her mother had always been a bit eccentric and secretive.

One thing her mother did teach her was how to stay young looking. From Belle’s earliest memory her mother was always watching treatment videos and putting layer upon layer of serums on her face. And of course, Belle herself began to follow the routine with her mother making sure she had a daily skin care routine which could last a few hours. Something she has always continued.

But when Belle returns to her mother’s condo, she discovers all the mirrors broken. She also finds out her mother was in serious debt. How could she have not known any of this was going on? As she unpacks some boxes her mother had stored, she finds a pair of her mother’s red shoes. She decides to put them on. But something happens to Belle, something she doesn’t understand. Soon she finds herself at a treatment spa called La Maison de Meduse where she is promised experimental treatments which will keep her face young.

Not really understanding what is truly happening to her, she discovers the secrets behind the mirrors, the looking glass. It is frightening and confusing, but she begins to fall victim to the treatments, it seems, just like her mother. But her mother died. Will she die? But suddenly that doesn’t matter, she is lured away from reality.

Rouge is a very complicated story filled with love and hate of each other and of oneself. It touches upon mother-daughter relationships, the good, the bad and the ugly. It mocks what some will do to keep young no matter what the consequences. One must learn to step away from the mirror because you could truly get sucked in and shatter your life.

Thank you #NetGalley #Simon&Schuster/MarySueRicciBooks #Rouge #MonaAwad for the advanced copy.

I felt a bit called out by this book, which I found understandable & amusing. I use an essence with the exact ingredients that Belle has (green tea, fermented rice, algae), along with products including snail mucin, birch, mushroom. I also empathize with the use of eye-watering cream (though I haven't used one with diamond dust). I love this book. My only real complaint is that the bit of romance could have been more fleshed out. I would describe this as gothic. It's not fully horror but it's not as fantastical as fantasy usually is. It is fairytale inspired. Whether your favorite past time is sun tanning in baby oil or a 10 step K-beauty routine - I think you will enjoy this

[2.5 Stars]

In a genuinely shocking turn of events, Rouge is not my new favorite Mona Awad novel and is yet another 2023 release that didn’t live up to the hype. While it contained all the things that I tend to love: surrealism, commentary on the beauty industry, complex familial relationships, and jellyfish…….none of it totally worked for me. I’m not sure I could say exactly why, either, which is frustrating. I feel like I get what Awad was trying to say, I agree with her points, and I appreciated her satire…..yet it still wasn’t as poignant as it could have been. I often found myself almost bored and feeling like the novel was repetitive in a “need to kill some pages” way. If anything, I wish the whole book carried the energy of the last ~75 pages.

I’ll absolutely still pick up whatever Mona Awad comes out with next, since All’s Well and Bunny were such hits for me. But this one just wasn’t a new favorite.

Belle returns to La Jolla, where she spent a small portion of her teenage years, following her mother’s death only to become swept up in a fairy tale nightmare involving a neighboring house. Belle and her mother were/are addicted to elaborate skin care rituals, forever seeking the ultimate in youth-preserving mixtures and the house along the beach seems to offer the ultimate in treatments, but at what cost? And how does it relate to Belle’s memories from her youth back in Montreal?

I enjoyed this book quite a bit even though it’s not my usual style…I generally steer clear of the dreamy fantasy type horror that is found here. It was a bit of a slow start for me but a sped through the final third and found myself wanting more. Well done!

Thank you to Netgalley for the ARC!

I wanted to like this more than I did, I found myself getting lost in the prose and desperate for more of a through line in the story. The imagery was beautiful throughout, but I just wanted more substance to the characters and their motivations.

I honestly have no idea how to interpret anything I read in these pages but I somehow loved every second of it. Part mind-bending fairy tale, part literary masterpiece, full on delightful reading experience. I adored this even if I’m not 100% sure what it meant.

Storygraph review in link. Thank you for the book!

I really enjoyed reading this. I liked how there were flashback moments that lead up to the climax and it kind of felt like a full circle moment.

Rouge by Mona Awad

An eerie and enchanting gothic fairytale. Mona Awad has such an incredible talent for walking readers into the depths of a dark fantasy without them realizing how far they’ve gone until it’s too late. To come out the other side and need to sit with the experience. Really understand what they’ve been through and how they feel while the fog lifts. The writing is compelling and uniquely hers.

If you can read this in tandem with the audiobook, do it. Sophie Amoss yet again does an incredible job and adds so many layers. The atmosphere they create with the writing had the hairs on the back of my neck standing up for large portions of the book. I can’t say enough good things about the narration.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an advanced e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Rouge is a fever dream of a book, with allusions to Beauty and the Beast, mixed with Lynchian imagery, a dash of Cronenberg horror, and directed by Peter Strickland (see In Fabric). While not straight up horror, it delves into those dark recesses and wraps its tentacles around you tightly, not wanting to let go.

Our main character Belle is going through it. Her mom has passed away and she's left to clean up the mess left behind, while also trying to keep herself maintained. From here she's pulled into a world of superior beauty, given treatments at a Spa and begins to lose herself and her identity, leaving only her want of what is considered beautiful and right.

Beauty is a major theme of Rouge and one that it handles in a pretty satirical way. We get descriptions of many a product, which reminded me of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, though our main character is not even on the same level, though she does have her reasons for this bit of vanity, which are uncovered throughout this prickly novel. It's something that's passed down, yet frowned upon by her Mother when Belle is older. There's a reason behind this and even though their relationship is tumultuous for good reason, that love is still there which I found pretty striking.

I do feel the novel loses its way around the halfway point and starts to feel repetitive, before ramping up to a somewhat anticlimactic payoff, which ultimately ends in a reflective manner.

This is the first book I've read by Mona Awad and it makes me eager to finally pick up Bunny. Definitely worth a read!

And here's to hoping A24 picks this up because it would definitely fall into their wheelhouse with perfection.

Big thanks to Simon Element and NetGalley for providing me with an advanced copy of this novel, which is available in stores today!

This was my second time reading Mona Awad - my first was Bunny, which I really enjoyed and plan to reread one day. I think fans of that book will also have a great time with this one since it has similar overarching themes of something sinister in a vaguely magical yet contemporary world where there’s a bewitching group of people with a cult-like following. Rouge focuses on a mother and daughter who are both obsessed with beauty regiments and just generally defying aging and imperfections in any way possible. It is a learned behavior for Belle, who’s mixed-race and been constantly drilled into believing that beauty is lightening, tightening, brightening. She obsessively watches a beauty guru on YouTube and scrubs and slathers on potions, elixirs, and mists to try to keep her fears and anxieties at bay. (Seeing commercials for beauty products over the course of reading this was a wild experience; there were some frightening parallels.)

Underneath all this obsession with beauty lies something darker. There are several allusions to fairy tales like Beauty and the Beast, The Red Shoes, and even The Little Mermaid, among others. These folkloric references combined with Awad’s writing style felt magical, classic, and brutal all at once. Nothing is as it seems and you want so badly to pull back the curtain but are afraid of what you’ll find there. I personally was hoping for more horror and gore like there had been in Bunny, but there are still scenes that will stick with you. I continued thinking about it even when I wasn’t reading. Even though you may not completely understand what you’re reading since it’s so surreal in parts, Awad still paints stunning and unforgettable scenes that are fascinating to imagine.

If you’re in the mood for a weird, slightly creepy book about a complicated mother-daughter relationship, the traumatizing affects of being constantly inundated with unrealistic beauty standards, with undertones of fairy tales and how they can fail us, pick this one up. Thanks so much to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC!