“Beauty, when you come face-to-face with it like Tad is right now, can be very like a collision. A kind of violence.”

“No one knows what’s inside grief. Anything at all can be there.”

Mona Awad does it again.

Awad is masterful at writing women on the verge. Here, with Mirabelle, the depiction of grief is visceral. This will resonate with those especially that have had to grapple with relationships, in death, that which was a complex and nuanced relationship in life.

The Hitchcock references (both overt with rear window and covert with him pulling her out of the water and taking her back to his place (which, for me, was a delightful Vertigo callback as it is one of my favorite films.)

I know it is branded as a Snow White meets Eyes Wide Shut collision in setting and theme and I agree with that assessment. However, the La Maison de Méduse gave me Death Becomes Her as well as Suspiria (the original, obviously) vibes as well.

An aside, I was delighted at the few bunny references Mona gave her readers. Bunny pajamas, a stuffed bunny, tattoo references, and black netting/veils, among them.

There are moments, like there were in Bunny, and perhaps to some extent in All’s Well, dear reader - where you will ask yourself, “what the f*ck did I just read?” the amount of times I stopped reading to say wtf midway through this book I cannot highlight enough (the TC of it all I tell you!) you will feel it is, at points, ridiculous and too far, and too much and YET, you will keep reading. And by the time you flip the last page, you will feel foolish your ever doubted her and you will be changed and you will want to go down the rabbit hole again. That is the singular magic of Mona Awad.

The premise, without giving spoilers, also gave me shades of eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. This quote, in particular, was striking:
“If you extract one memory, the bad one, the absolutely unnecessary Free Radical of the Mind, the Comedone of the Soul, the one that’s filling and creasing and darkening your visage so hideously, it’s bound to affect the others, isn’t it?”

There are many themes in this book to unpack. Envy. At being selected, desired, an object of want.

Beauty standards from a white western worldview. Colorism, Xenophobia, etc.
That the desired effect of the treatment was a whitening (some would say “brightening” effect), was poignant and rang true.

This feels like a work that is semi-autobiographical in parts. Not in central plot, of course, but perhaps when it comes to family dynamics (father being from Egypt, mother being French Canadian) and how these dueling identities may have caused cruelty, ignorance, or pain. What it means to be measured against the disease of whiteness and a societal beauty standard that supports its spread.

No one does symbolism like Mona.

Here are a few of my favorites:
“I look around the dark, empty hall. The arched ceiling, I can finally see it, like a cage of white bone above us. The tank of red jellies has gone black now. All around me feels like a void. Like nothing at all.”

“His face lights up the architecture of me, my cage of bones brightening.”

“It’s like the Queen of Snow’s smile has invisible threads connected to all of our spines. And when her lips curve, we straighten.”

Envy, traumas, hate - “the inter generational variety.” How we can feed off them; How they can feed off us.

Being selected, chosen. How we pit women against one another in this flawed premise.

At the same time, the book highlights the solidarity of women and women-identified individuals. How it is possible to unify (as we have done and will continue to do) around the experience of being a woman, the pressures to be beautiful, something worthy of desire, the male gaze, to fight injustice and inequity, etc.

By book’s end, I shed tears on the beach along with our characters. The horror of aging, of poor body image, the curse of that and how it is passed generationally - the rose and thorn of mother-daughter relationships in all their horrors and ugliness but also, somehow, impossibly - the beauty of them as well.

I could spend hours dissecting and analyzing this book (the scene where the two female characters at rouge were each other’s mirror, their validation, alone. My God. The last scene with Sylvia also. And so many countless others.)

I will never look at a rose (or a trip to the aquarium, for that matter) the same way again.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for an ARC of this title. And thank you, to Mona Awad, for sharing your endless gifts.

My expectations were incredibly high with Rouge because Mona Awad’s other books are some of my all-time favorites. I think those expectations were partially to blame for why I was a bit disappointed by this one. By no means did I think it was a bad book, but I just could not get into it. It was repetitive in a way that made sense for the story, but that made it more of a slog to read than I would have liked. The writing was great, as she’s a great writer, but I found myself bored more than not. The environment and weirdness were both top tier though. The setting and vibe felt reminiscent to Eyes Wide Shut, which is maybe why ‘Tom Cruise’ was heavily featured. I enjoyed the commentary on what has been defined as beauty and how we have made whiteness the ideal. The idea that you can lose yourself when you’re trying to reach this impossible standard of what society has deemed to be beautiful.

Lovely, dark and written in that special, gorgeous style only Awad can pull off. I loved the themes at play here. I will be recommending this to fans of all genres.