Monte Price's Reviews > Rouge

If Mona Awad was ever going to write a book that I would enjoy, I feel like this would be the one. In part because so much of the buzz about this book was it being a critique of the beauty industry, and I am nothing if not a fan of books that look to comment on something. Even if the commentary is shallow, I enjoy a look at the way someone else; be it the author or a character, views something being the focal point of a story.

This doesn't really feel like that... In some ways, I would agree with other comments I've seen of people thinking that this could have been shorter. If I were to recommend this book to anyone it would be to people who have read and enjoyed The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, which was a book that I also hated, but I think that if you were able to view something there and find enjoyment you might find something similar here.

This is the story of Belle, a biracial girl was raised by her white mother. That's really the plot of the book. In some ways I wouldn't be surprised if this was Awad's most personal novel, or if that was a common sentiment ascribed to them without her saying as much, because so much of Belle seemingly struggling with her slightly darker complexion than her white mother is the driving point of the narrative. Personally, I've read enough stories of biracial women who wanted nothing more to be viewed as beautiful as their white mothers. And it's not that those stories aren't valid, or even that there isn't a link between that and the beauty industry at large... it's more that to me Rouge never makes that link between the standards of beauty and Belle's own feelings. Or even society and the way that Belle views herself. If anything this is a novel in which the outside world feels shockingly not present and so much of the connecting of the dots is on the onus of the reader to view things that are true in a lived reality sense, but just completely not at all of interest to the world that the narrative is trying to tell.

The way that reality is played within the narrative just feels messy and the kind of thing that a writer attempts to do to have the story viewed as something more complex than it really is. Manipulation is too strong a word, but it's certainly some lower-level trickery at work.

Truthfully the book is just bad... Partly because what good content there is is barely enough for a novella let alone something longer, and partly because the third act is such a convoluted mess that even if you were enjoying parts of this that I didn't the book ends on such a bad note that it's hard to look at what preceded it with rose-colored glasses.