Jessica Woodbury's Reviews > Rouge

I want to say that there were a lot of interesting pieces here but that they never came together. But is that the right critique? It's not like Awad's two previous novels, one of which I described (accurately!) as a phantasmagoria, were all neatly tied up with a bow. And I loved both Bunny and All's Well, found them cutting and funny, enjoyed their dark weirdness. With Rouge, it just never connected.

The prose practically floats a few inches above the page, it is so loose and liquid. Awad has a lot of fun with this and it's one of the novel's biggest strengths. Somehow it also is a weakness, as the feeling of being blown around made it hard for me to connect with our protagonist, Mirabelle or Belle, or much of anyone else. I missed the strong voice of her other work, this voice is certainly distinctive but it is more like a slather of cream on your cheek than a punch to the face.

There is a mother/daughter relationship at the heart of everything here, and there is a lot. Beauty standards looked at from every angle, including the ideals of being white, thin, smooth, young. So many fairy tales thrown in--Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, and most often Snow White--you can barely keep track of them. Cults and the way the powerful prey on the desperate. I haven't even gotten to all the stuff with mirrors and Tom Cruise and jellyfish. It felt like a few different books rather than just one book.

I enjoyed the weirdness, as I always do, it was unpredictable and strange and often offputting, though it lacked a visceral punch. But by the end, even though I knew the story of Belle and her mother, I didn't feel like I actually understood either one of them or have a connection to them. Our protagonist is more absence than presence much of the time. She comes much more alive during the periods of the book where she's confused and not making sense.

At the end the book seemed to think it was giving me an emotional climax, but it didn't get me on an emotional level at all, which was a real disappointment. Yes this is one of my very critical reviews that is also still supposed to be positive somehow. It's hard when you hit such heights of expectations (truly ALL'S WELL was one of my favorites of the last few years) and she does blaze some interesting new ground here.

It also suffers from my having read an excellent speculative novel about beauty standards and wellness cults, NATURAL BEAUTY by Ling Ling Huang, earlier this year and it often suffered by comparison in my mind.