I think I especially enjoyed this book because I'm interested in the beauty industry. I enjoy cosmetics & I am always on the quest for the best skin & haircare. I also find myself wishing I could change parts of me, but beauty standards are reserved for the wealthy. Cosmetic procedures are all too common on social media & everyone is expected to look the same. Butt lifts have increased in popularity despite being extremely dangerous (not to mention a big butt can usually be achieved with exercise). The beauty standard in this book is Nazi-esque. I find that these days the standard is a more medium skintone, with people risking cancer in the sun or slathering themselves with fake tan constantly, but the Nazi-esque standard makes sense for the story. The MC is bisexual (or possibly just gay). Her story, even without Holistik, is compelling. I wasn't sure what to expect for the ending, but I expected it to be less tragic. The end is sort of beautiful in its ugliness. TW: There is forced penetration/insemination, though not in the typical way.

*Thank you to Penguin Group Dutton, Ling Ling Huang, and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review*

Previously published at https://www.mysteryandsuspense.com/natural-beauty/

“It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.”

― Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata

When I was first sent this book, I thought it was about the dark side of being beautiful. But it’s not. This is a straight up horror story and I loved every second. In the vein of holistic beauty products such as Goop and similar brands that claim to be all natural, all organic and additive free, do you actually know what you are putting in your body and on your skin? The author does an amazing job in this almost satirical version of our current beauty and wellness obsession, not to mention the class divide of the wealthy being able to indulge in expensive treatments such as blood facials or gold body treatments, for example.

Our narrator, unnamed for most of this novel, then called Anna, is a former piano prodigy but stopped playing when her immigrant parents were hurt in a car accident after one of her recitals. Since then, she has taken low-paying jobs and lives in the basement of an apartment, using all of her money to help pay for the care of her parents. When she is approached at her waitressing job by the founder of Holistik, a beauty and wellness brand similar to Goop, she is over the moon. It is a coveted invitation and would be silly to turn down. She could afford to take care of her parents and maybe move out of her basement apartment. It’s an invitation they don’t give to just anyone. Employees there are well known for their unique looks and glowing skin and nails.

Holistik and several companies under their umbrella cater to the rich and famous. Their treatments and supplements are expensive and some of them are quite experimental and do things like change your hair color, make your skin glow and even alter your brain chemistry. Employees are encouraged to take part in these procedures and are required to take Holistik supplements daily. But when Anna’s skin shines and her hair turns a different color and even her legs seem longer, she questions what is in these supplements and what will happen when she stops taking them. And then her friend and coworker, Helen, passes away suddenly and Anna begins to connect the pieces of the dark side of Holistik and where they are getting their formulas from.

Natural Beauty doesn’t sound like a horror novel, but it definitely is mind-blowingly scary with horrifying scenes in which the reader is convinced Anna is daydreaming, but she’s not. One reviewer called this book sneaky and that it is. It begins as a commentary on identity and fitting in when you are an immigrant and then becomes darker and dark until the reader is in a maelstrom of unbelievable panic and horror. This is a fantastic novel and incredibly thought-provoking. One of the best I have read this year.

How far would you go for external beauty? A slow starting novel feeling like it’s just going to be filled with pretentious characters, this is a story of a young woman and former piano prodigy who starts to work for Holistik, a new type of beauty spa trying new experimental procedures, including on their own staff. Trigger warning if you are disturbed by skinny culture and the beauty obsessed, that is in the forefront of this novel but it twists that obsession into a horror that takes a look into the Eurocentrism of beauty standards. It took me a few chapters to really start to enjoy this book, like maybe 80 pages in, but did enjoy where the plot was going. Definitely a story more for people who prefer plot development and execution over character development; even with a slow start, stay hooked for the dark turn, the innovative plot and the smart and interesting writing. I believe this deserves more than three stars but not sure if it’s quite at four stars for me, likely falls in between

NATURAL BEAUTY
Ling Ling Huang

This book feels like pulled skin, claustrophobic conversations, and creatures that only existed in your mind, until now.

It’s a horror book that feels like a mix between literary fiction and sci-fi. It comes out tomorrow and I think it will appeal to the right type of reader.

Are you that reader?

Our main character looking for both the warmth and the cold that comes from a family starts working at an extreme beauty store in New York City. She soon becomes enveloped in something that gives her a new sense of purpose. We watch as slowly she begins to lose herself. Becoming someone and something else entirely.

I enjoyed my time reading NATURAL BEAUTY but it wasn’t pleasant. At times, it reads very romantic, almost pretty, and then it curves and morphs into something hideous, nearly unrecognizable. Some of the concepts and passages will get under your skin and some of the themes explored will trigger you.

NATURAL BEAUTY is visceral, and it cuts a little. Huang is a new voice, and it feels like we’ve been dancing around subjects she makes clear and plain. Her new piece of fiction is about all the horrible things we allow in the name of perfection, the violations we concede to that happen every day and the dissociation required to exist.

It’s as terrifying as everyday life.

NATURAL BEAUTY has already been optioned as a tv series. Get a jump and read it first.

Get your pre-order in because this book is coming tomorrow, April 4, 2023!

Thanks to Netgalley, PENGUIN GROUP Dutton, Dutton, and Penguin Random House Audio for the advanced copies.

NATURAL BEAUTY…⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I can admit when I'm wrong, and boy was I wrong when I thought "eh" just one chapter into this book -- I was a little thrown by the author's choice to drop us straight into the narrative, and I worried that the novel's pacing would falter. WRONG. Instead, NATURAL BEAUTY picked up steam like a freight train, and it became increasingly impossible for me to put it down. What a stunning, sly debut that interrogates our cultural obsession with beauty, wealth, and femininity and how those ideals intersect with white supremacy. A seductive, totally mesmerizing novel that paradoxically unraveled with slow purpose at a breakneck speed. A must read book, for sure!

Sly, surprising, and razor-sharp, Natural Beauty follows a young musician into an elite, beauty-obsessed world where perfection comes at a staggering cost.

How far would you go to obtain unnatural beauty? This book examines the lengths the head of a business empire will go to give the weathly, beauty at their fingertips. In his mind, CEO Victor, sees beauty as art. The book carefully entertwines the two throughout. Our MFC, must descend into the depths of this world to find herself and overcome past trauma.

Thank you to @netgalley and @penguinusa for allowing me to review this ARC.

Holistik looked like it would solve the unnamed narrator's problems. After all, the beauty and wellness company would pay her well, allowing her to pay for her parent's medical care. It quickly becomes apparent, at least the reader, that not all is well, that there's something sinister afoot. Her relationship with Helen, the niece of the owner, blossoms after she gives Helen piano lessons but then Helen confides things that, well, no spoilers. Race, class, body shaming, beauty standards- all are part of this tale which mixes horror and a touch of satire. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC. For fans of literary fiction with a tilt.

An accomplished debut novel which questions and warps ideas of beauty. wellness, the fixed notion of the self and how far we go to assimilate into a different culture and forget ourselves. It is tender yet heart-wrenching while completely working well within the genre of body horror and dystopia. I did sometimes feel the descriptions were either overly explicit or in some places too subtle, and the balance was still being negotiated throughout the novel.

I’ve really been a roll lately with choosing some really great reads, and this was just the newest addition to a slew of incredible 5-star books

<i>Natural Beauty</i> is a stunningly unique story following our Asian-American narrator, a former prodigious musician, who suddenly accepts a job at a sketchy new beauty company - the way this story was constructed was beautiful and brilliant, as we learn about her past and why she quit music, this beauty company becomes more and more sinister. It blends coming-of-age literary fiction with humor and horror, and Huang, herself a trained pianist, adds a personal touch to the story. the writing is SO visual, this absolutely needs to be adapted into a movie.

How far would you go for perfection? For a former piano prodigy, the sudden glow-up she receives from her new job at Holistik, a new-agey, luxury brand dedicated to all things beauty, is an added bonus for what she really needs - money. A much-appreciated added bonus.

A horror story based in the world of beauty is hardly new ground, but Huang exhibits a deftness with verisimilitude that keeps even the goriest parts grounded in the plausible. Even as the plot rocketed towards its inevitable, ghastly end, I still wondered if some of these procedures could still be worth it.

The ending was a bit bleaker than I’d have liked, but this is an impressive debut that seems destined to make the jump to the big screen - although I’m not sure I have the stomach for it!

Read if you: keep up on all the latest beauty trends, have rolled your eyes at Goop, don’t have a weak stomach, know you Bach from your Beethoven

"At Holistik , they teach me what I need to be afraid of to become beautiful."

For centuries women have endured weird, expensive, and occasionally painful treatments and procedures in their search for beauty.

And, frequently we never even question what we put in our bodies or rub on our skin . . . as long as it results in a flawless complexion, and longer eyelashes.

Huang's young narrator needs cash fast, so she begins working at Holistik, a high-end retailer of natural beauty products. The store wants their representatives to look their best, so the salesgirls are required to sample the wares.

"There is no longer any way to deny it. I am becoming my best self."

But, soon it becomes apparent that the owners of this beauty business have some pretty ugly plans for their employees, and the buying public.

There's a wonderfully creepy 'Stepford Wives' vibe to this one. The author kept me guessing, AND turning the pages. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm late for my bird poop facial. I bet you won't even recognize the new me!

This is a story about how far people will go for external beauty. The narrator of the story is a piano prodigy. Her parents, who immigrated from China, are both strong piano players but want a different life for their daughter in the United States. But she insists on learning piano, and quickly shows her skill. She is offered the chance to study at an elite music school, and seems on the way to a promising career. But then her parents are in a serious accident that leaves them institutionalized. And the narrator gives up her dream.

At first, she works as a dishwasher. But then she is offered a job working at Holistik, an elite health and beauty store known for its unusual and effective treatments and supplements. The narrator’s new job comes not just with a steady pay check, but access to Holistik’s products. She soon sees her appearance changing, just as she finds herself drawn into the orbit of Helen, the niece of Holistik’s founder. The deeper she goes into this new world, the more she starts to notice unusual things happening to her and those that she comes into contact with — and begins to wonder what lurks beneath Holistik and its owners’ beautiful surface.

This was an intriguing book. It offered interesting insights into the connections between beauty, belonging, and identity. For the narrator, the attraction of Holistik seemed to be more about the access it gave her to the worlds and people that had long felt out of reach, back to the days when she saw how her parents were treated and when she had to entertain wealthy benefactors of her music school. Her experience with Holistik intersected with her experience as the child of immigrants. Having often felt out of place and rejected by her peers, the appeal of belonging — being welcomed by Holistik, Helen, and others and finding society at large seeming to embrace her as her appearance changed — was powerful enough for the narrator to ignore, and sometimes even consciously accept, the many troubling signs that something was amiss. This was a thought-provoking read from a powerful new voice.

Highly recommended!

Natural Beauty is a deeply disturbing and satirical look at the beauty industry, and it delivered on all fronts. What started out as an eerie, slowly creeping premise ended with an absolutely wild revelation, and an intense, horrific chain of events.

Our unnamed protagonist is a former a piano prodigy, working as a dishwasher in New York City. She lives in a dingy basement with less than desirable roommates, and is barely able to make ends meet. Previously, she had spent her childhood studying piano with her parents, who made their living offering piano lessons in New Jersey, after fleeing China during the Culture Revolution. One day, our protagonist is offered a scholarship at The Conservatory, a renowned musical institute, where she spends the next eight years studying and refining her skill. But on the evening of her final recital, a terrible tragedy befalls her parents, and her life is thrown off course.

Now, with the pressures of financially supporting her parents’ 24 hour care facility, she accepts a job at a high-end beauty store. Holistik offers beauty and wellness to it’s wealthy patrons, and the store is filled with light haired, fair skinned, female employees who all represent a very similar western standard of beauty. Soon, our protagonist is taking multiple supplements, swimming in creams and dripping in serums; all required of her as a Holistik employee. Her eyelashes are growing, her legs are lengthening, her hair is lightening, and she realizes all too late that her natural features are no longer distinguishable. As she continues down the rabbit hole and spends more time at Holistik, she starts to discover the terrifying truth about this company and it’s products.

This story, was so SO mesmerizing. The author painted Holistik so clearly, and the descriptions of these absolutely absurd procedures and products were equally funny and horrifying. There is an absolutely tremendous amount of imagination and inventiveness that went into this story. The horror aspect was spectacularly written, with parts that were so grotesque I had to stretch out my face afterwards from the scrunched up “ew” face that I was constantly making. This was dark, hilarious, terrifying and disturbing, laced with beautiful writing and I absolutely loved it.

In Natural Beauty, our unnamed narrator (which becomes a more and more interesting choice the further into the story we delve is a former musician of formidable talent, who has abandoned her passion for the piano after her beloved parents are in a terrible accident. The story opens as she is struggling in NYC, living in a cruddy basement apartment with crappy roommates, barely eking out a living, let alone earning enough money to pay for her parent's rehab facility. She is then offered the opportunity to work at Holistik, a boutique selling wildly coveted, expensive--and perhaps experimental-- products and services to beauty, age, and wellness-obsessed celebrities. The story is a beautiful meditation on grief, and family, and beauty itself. It skewers the cult of beauty in a surreal and I might even say satirical way also it feels utterly, gorgeously sincere. The writing is lyrical but it doesn’t veer purple. And the story is at turns beautiful and horribly grotesque and very, very sad. If you like the imaginative strangeness of Mona Awad’s books, the crusty, the bodily grossness of Otessa Moshfegh, or if you enjoyed the weirdness and WTFery of A Touch of Jen by Beth Morgan then you may dig this one. Magical realism, alternate reality, speculative fiction? I don't know what you call these stories, but if you gravitate toward books like this, Natural Beauty will be a favorite.

The author's take on self-care and skincare delivered as promise, but this reader found the unexpected sexual content (and the nature of that content) deeply disturbing.

You know I read a lot of own voices these days. Most of that is Asian and Asian American literature. I'm very unapologetic about it. I find it's mostly historical fiction in the form of leaving a war torn country or contemporary romance, but sometimes it surprises you. Sometimes it's this.

I don't like straight horror. I've only enjoyed two of Stephen King's books. Do with that what you will. I loved every second of this. As a woman that grew up in the celebrity obsessed culture of the United States that has since moved to Los Angeles, this depiction of the beauty industry hits quite close to home. What is in your beauty products? Do you care? How much will you pay to be young and beautiful?

A gorgeous debut. I will be reading the author's next works. Fun fact, my friend Bea met Ling Ling at a wedding and said she was lovely, if that helps you pick the book up at all.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher.

I basically read this in one sitting, not just because it is on the shorter side, but because I needed to know what was going to happen. And oh boy, did things happen. A young, cash starved Chinese American woman takes a job at a very high end natural skincare story called Holistik. Her parents are in a long term health care facility due to an accident, and our narrator has given up her dreams of becoming a professional pianist to take care of them. Nothing about her life is clean until Holistik comes along and recruits her, with its white washed walls (and employees).

A dark tale about the lengths we will go to for beauty and what beauty even is, this is a great read.

After suffering a family tragedy, a once promising pianist leaves the acclaimed conservatory she's been attending and starts to work minimum wage jobs. She's then recruited to work at the top beauty and wellness store Holistik where she's given thousands of dollars worth of free products that beautify from the inside out. But when things start to go a little too far, she starts to question what it's all worth and how far she will go. Ling Ling Huang's satirical debut explores consumerism, self-worth, race, and identity in a compelling way that makes it hard to put down.

I went into this one blindly and I would recommend that. I'm still processing the horror-esque turns it took. I almost wanted it to be longer because I wanted to know more about the background characters. Huang's book is unique and sucks you in.

3.5/5 stars - rounded down.

"Natural Beauty" takes readers down a deep dive into an alternate reality in NYC where Holistik Beauty, a supposedly all-natural beauty and health company on the forefront of scientific advancements, has taken over the market share of the industry. Told from the first person perspective of an unnamed narrator, we get to see as she's pulled into the alluring world of Holistik and begins her dangerous plummet down the metaphorical (and physical) rabbit hole. Author Ling Ling Huang has clearly put an extensive amount of thought and creativity into the supposed inventions and product breakthroughs that are signature to the company - from in-house silkworms that are called on-demand to weave employee garments, to remoras that suck out cheap Botox fillers from clients' skin, to the extensive and mysterious powders and formulas that both employees and customers take regularly.

Interwoven across the present are flashbacks to the narrator's past, to her humble upbringing as the child of Chinese immigrants who became piano teachers, her long-standing love of music and her innate talent at piano, and her introduction as a student at the Conservatory where she becomes a trained musician. Her life goes completely off-course after her parents suffer a terrible accident after one of her recitals, and she takes on a job as a dishwasher at a local diner in an attempt to cover their ongoing rehabilitation costs. She's given a chance to work at Holistik after a chance encounter, not knowing what exactly she's signed up for.

This novel read like a fever dream, one that brought to light weighty questions on identity and race, standards of beauty, and the intentions behind the health and wellness industry at present. I struggled at times to keep up with the events and characters that unfolded, especially given the complexity of the fictional world Huang created. It contrasted greatly with the poignant and emotional flashbacks to the narrator's childhood and her parents, however, which were touching moments that illustrated both their struggles but also the depth of love they had for each other. As someone who had a similar upbringing and background, I think these moments gave so much additional depth to our character and highlighted the motivations for many of her decisions and actions.

Thought-provoking, dark, and disturbing - this is not a novel to be read lightly.