This is sharp, uncomfortable, and very smart, and it knows exactly where it wants to press.

New Skin is a darkly comic, deeply unsettling look at a mother and daughter locked in a relationship that feels both intimate and suffocating. Linli Feng is twenty-six and just on the edge of escape, newly accepted into a NY graduate program and ready to build a life that does not orbit her mother’s chaos. That plan collapses the moment Fanny reappears, disfigured and spiraling after years of underground cosmetic procedures in Los Angeles’s bootleg beauty economy. Fanny finds herself in trouble with the law as well as on the cusp of changing her life via a reality TV show and Linli just wants to escape

Linli and Fanny are bound by love, resentment, loyalty, and competition in ways that feel real. Their relationship is not exaggerated for satire.
The reality TV element could have tipped into gimmick territory, but instead it becomes a brutal extension of the book’s central question. What does American success demand? Watching Fanny chase redemption through spectacle while Linli tries to salvage stability and her own future creates a devastating tension.

I finished this book unsettled in the best way, and I highly recommend it.

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