When I heard that a horror novel was centered around the current beauty influencer culture, I knew I had to read it. This book was written and plotted in such a way that is horror at its greatest. Everyone can identify with Mirabelle, which means any of us could fall into the same trap.
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Awad exposes to light the inner voices women have cultivated from their observations of the world around them since childhood; these stains left on our psyches from years of daily impressions of what makes a woman beautiful, worthy, and desirable. She brings these inner voices to life, she feeds them with promises of eternal youth and brightness and shine, and after the people succumb to this temptation, they are fed to the people who implanted the inner voices in the first place.
Mirabelle, half French and half Egyptian, is raised by her beauty-obsessed mother. She grows up surrounded by beautiful dolls that look just like her mother, and nothing like her. She sees her mother as the ideal for beauty, and her mother sees Mirabelle’s youth as the ideal for beauty. They love one another but they envy one another. This envy is exploited in such a way that pits them against each other and leads to their estrangement.
Rouge closely examines race, gender, and the beauty industries by drawing out the horror of what people do to themselves in the name of beauty. There is evil, there is ugliness, there is beauty, there is love. It’s a wonderful novel and I recommend it for horror AND beauty aficionados. There’s something in it for all of us.
Publisher’s Summary
For as long as she can remember, Belle has been insidiously obsessed with her skin and skincare videos. When her estranged mother Noelle mysteriously dies, Belle finds herself back in Southern California, dealing with her mother’s considerable debts and grappling with lingering questions about her death. The stakes escalate when a strange woman in red appears at the funeral, offering a tantalizing clue about her mother’s demise, followed by a cryptic video about a transformative spa experience. With the help of a pair of red shoes, Belle is lured into the barbed embrace of La Maison de Méduse, the same lavish, culty spa to which her mother was devoted. There, Belle discovers the frightening secret behind her (and her mother’s) obsession with the mirror—and the great shimmering depths (and demons) that lurk on the other side of the glass.
Snow White meets Eyes Wide Shut in this 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—as well as the danger of internalizing its pitiless gaze. Brimming with California sunshine and blood-red rose petals, Rouge holds up a warped mirror to our relationship with mortality, our collective fixation with the surface, and the wondrous, deep longing that might lie beneath.
Book Club Questions for Rouge by Mona Awad
- How does your impression of Noelle, Belle’s mother, change throughout the book? Is it your impression that changes or is it Belle’s?
- Talk about Mirabelle’s Grandmere. She clearly disapproves of Noelle. How does that affect her relationship with Mirabelle?
- Awad’s making a couple of dramatic statements in this book. Can everyone think of a different one?
- Do you think that Noelle does enough to protect Mirabelle from Seth? Why does she keep that mirror if she is protective of her child?
- What does Seth represent?
- Rouge has an “unreliable narrator” – Mirabelle’s thoughts are at times grief stricken, immature, intoxicated, and envious. How does that shape the way the story unfolds?
- Hud Hudson is such an interesting character. He wants to save Mirabelle, he wants to find his brother, but even he is sucked into the world at the house on top of the cliff. What are your thoughts on Hud?
- Did you see yourself in any of the characters of this book?
- Sylvia evolves from the beginning to the end of the novel, like Noelle. What do you think of her and how does Mirabelle’s portrayl of her influence that impression?
- What does this book say about the beauty industry?
- At the end of the book, there is a grand feast held. What point is Awad trying to make here?
- What do you think happens to the red jellyfish after the escape?
- Have you ever been sucked into a beauty narrative and tried products that you couldn’t afford or that didn’t work?
- What is your biggest takeaway from this book?
- Do you have recommendations of similar books for the rest of the book club?
