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!

What a wonderfully weird, wacky horror read! I spent the first third of the book feeling incredibly sad for the MC, the second half thinking "what the heck is going on here," and the last third I absolutely devoured in a sitting. Mona Awad is a brilliant mind, and I loved not only the story itself but the commentary on the standards of womanhood and the dynamic between mothers and daughters, particularly in regard to beauty.

The writing style is mysterious and eerie. Honestly, the entire book felt like a creepy feverdream, but one that, by the end, stands resolute in its cautionary tale to women trying to live up to society's never-ending expectations.

Thank you to NetGalley and Simon Element for the ARC.

Rouge was well written and had a good pace with somewhat of a fever dream landscape. The relationships in the story needed to be more crafted but overall it had a nice plot.

Thank you to Netgalley for the advanced reader copy!

A huge thank you to S&S, Marysue Rucci books & Netgalley for the physical/digital ARC!

3.5 stars rounded up.

One of my most highly anticipated releases! Let me start this by saying I am a big Mona Awad fan, and while this is not my favorite of her works, I did enjoy it.

This story follows Mirabelle, a dress shop worker who is obsessed with her skincare routine and religiously watches skincare videos. When her mother dies suddenly, she travels back to he mother's house and ends up embarking on a harrowing journey. Magic mirrors and other fairy tale lore, Egyptian mythology, and gothic vibes make this unhinged tale very atmospheric. In this nonlinear narrative with an unreliable narrator, many themes are explored. A critical look at the beauty industry and "perfectionism." A toxic mother-daughter relationship where the mother is white and the daughter is biracial. Colorism. Microagressions. Impossible beauty standards. Grief. Acceptance.

What I enjoyed:

-split timeline
-abstract plot
-cool imagery
-unhinged character arc
-elite, cult-y vibes
-weird jellyfish stuff
-the tense slowburn feel
-underlying themes
-liked the ending a lot

What I Disliked:

-bizarre rambly prose like you would expect, but this kind of lacked the forward motion it needed to keep me fully engaged
-some of the dialogue didn't work for me
-pacing was an issue and I found myself slightly stuck at about 50% for a bit, if the whole book was like the last 20% it would have been gold
-the romance subplot felt like it was just thrown in there as an afterthought

All in all, I think this will be a hit for a lot of my lovers of the strange and surreal. Despite a few struggles I had personally, I still was happy to have read and been on this odd, ambient journey.

DNF @20%

I liked the start of the book, but as soon as the actual story started I quickly lost interest. I love Bunny and like All's Well by this author, this one just didn't work for me.

**3.75-stars rounded up**

Rouge is the 2023-release from Mona Awad. It's my second novel from this author, the first being All's Well. I actually felt very similar to this one that I did All's Well, except I enjoyed the content and messages of this one more.

In this story we meet Belle, a lonely shopkeeper, living in Montreal, with a penchant for skincare and watching skincare videos. When Belle's mother, Noelle, unexpectedly dies, Belle has to travel to her mom's home in Southern California to settle her estate.

As she's there and begins to dig into her mother's life, she finds Noelle had built up considerable debt and was living a lifestyle that raises a lot of questions about her death.

The mystery thickens when a woman in red appears at the funeral offering clues about Noelle's life. These clues, along with a pair of red shoes, help Belle to find Maison de Méduse, a lavish, yet eerily cult-like salon to which her mother was completely devoted. This is where Belle, like her mother before her, becomes obsessed with the mirror, and the Alice in Wonderland-like world that exists behind it.

Rouge is described by the publisher as being a 'surreal descent into the dark side of beauty, envy, grief, and the complicated love between mothers and daughters. With black humor and seductive horror, Rouge explores the cult-like nature of the beauty industry.'

I did get all of these things, but only wish I could have understood what was going on in the second-half of the story more. It started strong, then lost me. As with All's Well, I loved the beginning, but as Belle got more involved and invested in the world of Maison de Méduse, the narrative went so far into fever-dream territory, that I'm afraid the majority of it went over my head.

Therefore, by the time I got to the end, I couldn't decipher what I'd read. Honestly, the latter half, I had pretty much given up on true understanding and was more invested in the lyrical writing and word play.

I think for people who have loved Awad's stories in the past, or people who love weird fiction in general, particularly with beautiful writing, you should read this. I'm glad I picked it up. It was beautiful. I did love the modern Dark Fairy Tale quality of the story. I could actually see this being turned into a great movie, or limited series. Maybe I would understand it more in that format.

Thank you so much to the publisher, Simon Element, for providing me with a copy to read and review. I know so many Readers are going to love this, even if it wasn't 100% for me.

This book was wild and at times wildly uncomfortable but I could not put it down. Absolutely a surreal fairytale and an incredible take on the beauty and influencer industry.

I absolutely loved this book. the discussion of beauty labor and pressure felt salient and topical, but not too on the nose. the added dimension of that pressure as a woman of color, and specifically with a white mother, was eye opening and heart breaking. it was a wild and kooky ride, but one with an extreme amount of substance in our skin care, “wellness,” and beauty obsessed world.

I should have known better. I REALLY wanted to like Bunny but about 20% in I thought "what in the world is all the hype about? This is terrible." Now, here I am thinking the exact same thing. I think the word "gothic" in the summary really drew me in for this one but *ugh* I was bored.

If you really want to read warped, fever-dream novels centered on women's pursuit of beauty, read Allie Rowbottom's "Aesthetica" or "Natural Beauty" by Ling Ling Huang.

Real Rating: 4.5* of five, rounded up for agreeably assaulting institutions I despise

I had the kind of mother who told her daughters, "you have to suffer for beauty, girls." Noelle reminded me a lot of Mama. Deeply shallow, focused to the exclusion of all else on irrelevancies, fripperies, and appearances, Noelle's my definition of toxic womanhood. Also very much the embodiment of what women were and are told they were supposed to be, to care about, and to focus on.

How horrifying. How titanically wasteful.

And how ripe for a loud, satirical takedown, which Author Awad delivers. Adding a supernatural edge to it, no less.

This kind of dark, menacing take on consumerism's extra-toxic focus on women and the messaging aimed squarely at their money is something I wish more women wrote. I remember my mother's obsessive regimens for her skin and how many perfumey unguents and masks she would bring home from the department store. I never saw the dentist and got one pair of glasses, one pair of shoes a year...she had dozens of these things littering her bathroom counter. Yep. I know this obsession is real.

The reality of it made, for me, the supernatural element...humorous, in a very black and cynical way. Of course there must be some awful, evil outside agent making us feel this way...no rational person would surrender to obsession so easily, you can hear the self-justifiers and excusers say. It was genius for Author Awad to make those evil outside agents the malevolent supernatural entities of La Maison de Méduse instead of the blandly corporate agents of evil called Lanvin, Coty, Revlon, et alii.

This gives her so much more latitude to poke fun, too. She's got her sights on the obsession with surfaces, and the ease of trapping women with such simple lures as beauty and youthful appearance. There's a whiff of colorism in the discussions of "managing one's skin tone" that made me cringe. It rang all the more loudly in my ears after I read her sketch of the beauty obsession that's gripped her middle-aged self in <I>The Walrus</i>. What a wonderful, wry way to send up one's own foibles and insecurities, I thought. What a talent this author has to make me, a certifiable man and victim of neglect by a beauty addict, read the story with such intensity and interest.

It didn't hurt that Author Awad wrote in that piece:
<blockquote>A bookseller once told me that when you buy a book, you’re also buying the idea of time in which to read it. A down payment on an extension of life, a shimmer of immortality. With my growing collection of serums, I was perhaps seeking something similarly existential. An illusion of control. A staving off of death.</blockquote>
Yep, as the saying goes, thass me.

Why I'd say to read it is that it's a great antidote to the huge ocean of mediocre man-blaming same-ol' same-ol' women's fiction. It's bracingly honest about the internal roots of obsession without ever excusing the forces outside that drive to turn it, purely for profit, into addiction.

I really enjoyed Bunny, and I liked All's Well. This is a different world from those, but we are similarly plunked down into a feverish near-real world with unlikeable and strange characters who have an awful lot of problems. Bunny dealt with academia and All's Well was the theater-academia novel, but this one takes on fairy tales and the beauty industry in a very solid attack that feels wistful at the same time it sucker punches you. I think the ending was a little pat (but I liked having some resolution and some real answers)- this book is strongest when it doesn't quite make sense. Four stars for the fun, and for the depressing reality that I probably need all the serums and moisturizers and whatnots that our heroine is using for much of the book. It lacks the fifth star because it doesn't actually go far enough. If you're going to hint at systemic racism, go there. Embrace the fact that this isn't just "beauty" standards but standards of whiteness being forced on everyone else. That quibble aside- this is another mesmeric horror story by Awad, and I recommend it.

It kills me to give Mona Awad only two stars! I still love her! I still love the way she writes and her weird and wonderful brain! This one was just not my favorite of hers. I liked the story and the satire and there are some great "set pieces." But it felt very repetitive and slow. But that's ok! I'll be there for Awad's next one!

Belle returns to Southern California following the strange death of her mother, Noelle. Their relationship was estranged and complicated before her death, but they both shared an obsession with vanity. As Belle attempts to tidy up her mother's affairs, she is embraced by an exclusive luxury spa called La Maison de Méduse where her beauty-obsessed mother was also a member. She's unexplainably drawn to the facility and begins to uncover what lies behind both her mother's and her own obsession with mirrors and their appearance, as well as the dangers that lurk beyond the other side of the glass.
Rogue is a stunning gothic tale from author Mona Awad that explores the relationship between women's value and age, unrealistic beauty standards and beauty as currency as well as the complicated nature of grief, the dynamic of female relationships and so much more. But it's also a sharp commentary on society and beauty. It's like a fantastical, horrific dream filled with such a sense of desperation that we all can identify with so well.
Awad's writing is tremendous here. She cleverly plays with words, swapping "severe" with the much darker variation of "sever." It's so dark and, at times, so very funny. Her style is completely unique and you know I love a flawed unlikeable female main character.
Frankly, I wasn't sure what to expect going into this novel. I personally didn't enjoy Bunny. Rouge is still weird and has that same dream-like quality, but it's relatable in a way that Bunny just wasn't.
Thank you to the author, NetGalley and S&S/Marysue Rucci Books for sharing this advance copy with me in exchange for my honest review.
RATING: 4.5/5

Another insane Mona Awad book! I fell in love with the author’s writing when I read Bunny earlier this year and again, fell completely in love and was hooked from the very beginning of Rouge.

The description of this book as a gothic horror novel is not wrong but, at its core, ROUGE is a novel about mother daughter relationship ties and how strong they are even when deeply fraught. It is this, in the end, that brings depth and a resolution that might bring a tear to your eye.

But the book is about many other things, most notably the pull that the beauty industry has for many. It's impossible to find your own identity and worth when you are in thrall to the beauty industry and its influencers. ROUGE is also about envy and its toxic results. About fashion. About the contrast between light and dark as manifested in depictions of LA and Montreal, the main character's mother and herself, and yes, in skin. About good and evil, the latter embodied by a Tom Cruise look-alike demon. And about love.

The surreal plot swirls around the main character, with shifting timeframes and perspectives. When reading this, I found it best to let the plot unfold around me rather than trying to make sense of everything as it happened. It makes sense more in the entirety than in the details. I knew this going in, having previously read and liked the author's, BUNNY. The supernatural aspects of the book kept it interesting for me, but ultimately what I loved about it was the underlying reality concerning the beauty industry and mother-daughter relationships.

This is my first book from Mona Awad, and the best way I could describe this book to you is that it reads like a fever dream.

Our main character, Maribelle, also referred to as Belle, has returned to her mother Noelle’s residence in La Jolla. After learning about her mother’s sudden and tragic death, Belle has arrived home to settle her affairs. The further she delves into her mother’s story, she comes to learn that she was more of a mystery than what she had previously believed to know. She was under the impression that her mom had a life somewhat put together, only to find out she was heavily in debt.

We also come to learn that unlike Belle, Noelle is this sultry and mysterious woman known for her eye catching beauty. She is also an absentee parent figure to Belle, and the father is completely out of the picture. Belle often expresses feeling inferior to her mother for not possessing the same attributes that her mother has in terms of westernized beauty standards. Belle’s physical features take after her father more so. She tries to make up for her inferiority complex through taking up a strict skincare regimen and any other procedure to keep up her appearance. The story also delves into unrealistic beauty standards that are placed on women in today’s society, as well as how much of a part that played in Belle’s personality due to her relationship with her mother, which at times felt like some sort of rivalry.Flawless beauty like the kind her mother is recognized for is Belle’s obsession.

This book is unsettling in the sense that you do not trust any of the characters. Even Belle, our main character, alludes to being an unreliable narrator. She narrates the story jumping back and forth in time, so be prepared for a non linear timeline. You also have nods to fairy tales such as Snow White, mixed in with a fair amount of horror elements. There is an ominous character who appears like Tom Cruise that continues to encourage Belle to attend the spa that promises to aid in her attaining beauty and youth.

Mona does an incredible job of immersing you into this dream-like world with her writing. Although I usually prefer a more plot driven narrative, she made this book a very enjoyable read.

Thank you to NetGalley for the arc in exchange for an honest review.
I will be posting this review to my GoodReads account as well.

One of the most amazing things about reading Mona Awad is that I always find myself thinking, “wow, this is completely insane” while also at the same time thinking “this just makes so much sense!”

Not sure what this says about me or about Awad (armchair psychologists, do your worst), but her novels are a singular experience in all the best ways.

The tone and voice in this are very similar to that of All’s Well and Bunny, but the story is something wholly different, and I love that Awad gives us that consistently wonderful voice while speaking to a completely different (if equally weird and creepy) plot.

In the simplest sense this is a reimagining of Beauty and the Beast, though it’s really much more than that. I liked the use of the fairytale as the jumping off point and broader allusion-driven parameter for the story, but I liked even more that it went in its own unique directions.

The atmosphere here is rich and evocative, and the wordplay is to die for (literally so for some of the characters).

I have difficulty categorizing all of Awad's work, Rouge included, and that is one of the main reasons I absolutely love her. This was weird, dark, and completely unputdownable. The Snow White vibes were strong, but this is an infinitely better (and somehow more believable) story that I am going to be thinking about for months.

One the easiest 5 stars I've given this year (and honestly might be my top book of the year).

Mona Awad has created a contemporary fairytale that jumps straight into the toxicities of the beauty industry and the perpetual obsession with youth. This is served with the complexities of mother/daughter relationships and grief.

This book is a fever dream served in a gothic fairytale retelling and I absolutely loved it. I laughed, was confused, and then I cried. Rouge made me feel all the feelings. I can't wait for a reread.