Rouge by Mona Awad

I picked this book up because it was recommended as a 'summer read'. So to start off, no it does not fit that by my definition, which is something well written but light hearted, something that by definition you do not have to think too hard about. It is, however well worth reading, and does fit the 'well-written' half of a good summer read. Then I read that it was a horror story, which also doesn't quite fit (I am not a reader of that genre, to be sure, but it seems like being scared is at the heart of horror, and that just does not happen here). What Rouge is, though, is a dark, gothic fairytale that, at its core, offers a scathing satire of the contemporary beauty industry. The novel centers around Mirabelle, also called Mira by her friends and Belle by her family, a young woman with a pathological obsession for her skincare routines and skincare vlogs. The book begins in medias res after Belle’s mother’s funeral. We quickly come to understand the tense, troubled relationship Belle had with her mother, who was likewise obsessed with youth and beauty - achieving it, preserving it, comparing it, chasing it to whatever end. Belle begins to dig into the mysteries of her mother’s life and death, including her significant debt at the time of her death and seeming memory loss in the final weeks of her life. The mystery only thickens when Belle is led by a woman in a red dress from the funeral to a fancy spa on the cliffside of La Jolla, a spa her mother frequented. Belle descends - literally and figuratively - into the depths of the spa, lured into the cultish organization by the promise of life-changing beauty treatments. So there is satire, there is fun, there is a little bit of unwrapping of your own attitude towards all this, and it is well done.