Mona Awad

Rouge

Amelia

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

𝑂𝑑𝑖𝑙𝑒

I'm wearing a dread of liquid gold that burns like the sun. Im wearing shoes of reddest blood. The mirrors are cracking all arond me.

Why didit change? is a question all over his face. A handsome face, I can't help but notice. Tan, angular, sharp. Very well hydrated. His brimmed hat and his suit remind me of old movies. The sort Mother liked us to watch together, mostly French New Wave and Hollywood noirs. A certain kind of man in those movies she loved. Mysteriously broken. Beautiful, but something off. Forever moving to a minor key. Always in the process of lighting a cigarette. Always half smiling through the smoke, sort of like this man is now. 

From the critically acclaimed author of Bunny comes a horror-tinted, gothic fairy tale about a lonely dress shop clerk whose mother’s unexpected death sends her down a treacherous path in pursuit of youth and beauty. Can she escape her mother’s fate—and find a connection that is more than skin deep? 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.

A Novel

weird girls by the ocean is a great genre

Anna Oeltjenbruns

It took me three separate tries over the course of a year to finish this book. The beginning and middle are great and flow well, but I was fighting demons to finish the last third. I couldn’t tell you what happened plot wise, but there were strong Vibes and Aesthetics for sure. I still love Awad’s writing, but I would recommend Bunny and All’s Well instead of this one. 

this was nearly impossible to finish. i pushed through because i've been studying the snow white tale and its retellings/variations, and i was interested in whatever take mona awad would have, but 

 was paper-thin in its examination of the tale's themes and was mostly a waste of time. a number of things tested my patience, but mostly i did not enjoy the writing at all. i'm trying to remember if awad's stylistic quirks annoyed me as much when i read 

 so repetitive? so grating with its clipped and bizarrely structured sentences? did it feel so unsubtle? was it so so so repetitive? maybe the plot was fun and punchy enough that i overlooked all that, if it had been there. 

's worst qualities minus any of the charm to distract me. 

it's sad because i did so want to enjoy this. i mean, if you know me, you know how i feel about mother-daughter relationships and skincare and beauty cults and such. it can have its one star because some of the material does deliver on what the blurb promised, albeit clumsily. i am, on the whole, thoroughly disappointed, which is a worse feeling than if i had expected nothing and hated it. but i feel like mona awad and i can still find common ground because her plots continue to compel me. which is to say, i will be tuning in for the 

 sequel and i hope that might repair the mess 

though i have to say, there was really no need to call that cat a whore. twice.

rory

girl fuck tom cruise. 

this was nearly impossible to finish. i pushed through because i've been studying the snow white tale and its retellings/variations, and i was interested in whatever take mona awad would have, but rouge was paper-thin in its examination of the tale's themes and was mostly a waste of time. a number of things tested my patience, but mostly i did not enjoy the writing at all. i'm trying to remember if awad's stylistic quirks annoyed me as much when i read bunny and i'm coming up short. was bunny so repetitive? so grating with its clipped and bizarrely structured sentences? did it feel so unsubtle? was it so so so repetitive? maybe the plot was fun and punchy enough that i overlooked all that, if it had been there. rouge, however, reads terribly with all of bunny's worst qualities minus any of the charm to distract me. 

it's sad because i did so want to enjoy this. i mean, if you know me, you know how i feel about mother-daughter relationships and skincare and beauty cults and such. it can have its one star because some of the material does deliver on what the blurb promised, albeit clumsily. i am, on the whole, thoroughly disappointed, which is a worse feeling than if i had expected nothing and hated it. but i feel like mona awad and i can still find common ground because her plots continue to compel me. which is to say, i will be tuning in for the bunny sequel and i hope that might repair the mess rouge has made.

though i have to say, there was really no need to call that cat a whore. twice.

i guess i’d rather go to the institut de Méduse than take the substance 

Thi Chinh

Mother-daughter relationships, to begin with, are such a complex concept that is so hard to grasp. There’s just so much to unpack there—the desire to be different and not make the same decisions (or mistakes), the constant pull to be just like her, and the internal tug-of-war that ensues when you defy/follow her path that ultimately leads the daughter into thinking, “what if I’m wrong?” or “what if she gets angry at me?” or the penultimate “I just want to make her proud”. All these things contribute to the anxiety that comes with this kind of relationship, and I think Rouge portrayed it well. As we follow Belle along the journey of grief, we see snippets of love-hate for her mother. We see how a narrative highlighting one’s perception of their mother can be so elaborate and complicated, showcasing how it is possible to have a fraught insight into the person who literally gave birth to you. It’s not easy, and it never will be. As seen in Belle’s personality and challenges she came across, while there’s resentment and a semblance of hate towards Noelle, there’s that underlying feeling of loving her all the same. That, in my opinion, is the pinnacle of what Mona Awad is trying to achieve here—love despite it all. Love as the result of hard work, of misunderstandings, of failures. Love as in the one that saves them both in the end.

And then there’s beauty, specifically achieving that idealized version of yourself. In the beginning, Belle is unsatisfied. She is always too much of the wrong thing. She is always lacking in the things that make other people beautiful. So she puts on so much skincare, so many ampoules and serums that will make her just like her mother—a symbol of beauty and good looks. Does she achieve that? Of course not. So, she goes to Rouge. Think of it as a spa, a treatment center, where you’ll become what you’ve always wanted. In reality, it’s much more dangerous, much more ominous than that. Because of course, it is. Nothing is as it seems, and I think Awad holds so much regard for things turning sour if you want it badly. Perhaps the trick here is to pretend you don’t want something to get it. In this reality, playing hard to get might be the key to a happy ending. But who knows, there’s always going to be a fuck-up close by so I guess you might as well wish hard for that thing after all.

Anyway, at this point, Awad has that formula down to the tee—”X is unsatisfied with her reality. X goes to Y, discovers herself. At Y, she realizes that she wants to go back because of (terrible, sinister truth). Good news: she does. Bad news: trouble ensues as soon as she goes back.” This rings true for All’s Well, Bunny, and now, Rouge. While it is easy to get through these things, especially since you’re already expecting what will happen, it does lose its magic, the Mona magic if you will. I enjoyed the mind fuckery, but I do admit that it gets old when you’re three books in, and all stories kind of blend into one another. 

Overall, it was a good read to get lost in. It reeled me in with Belle’s relationship with her mother. The bait was sweet and intriguing. However, I got tired of biting. I still finished it, of course, but I don’t think I’ll think about it for a long time.

Mother-daughter relationships, to begin with, are such a complex concept that is so hard to grasp. There’s just so much to unpack there—the desire to be different and not make the same decisions (or mistakes), the constant pull to be just like her, and the internal tug-of-war that ensues when you defy/follow her path that ultimately leads the daughter into thinking, “what if I’m wrong?” or “what if she gets angry at me?” or the penultimate “I just want to make her proud”. All these things contribute to the anxiety that comes with this kind of relationship, and I think Rouge portrayed it well. As we follow Belle along the journey of grief, we see snippets of love-hate for her mother. We see how a narrative highlighting one’s perception of their mother can be so elaborate and complicated, showcasing how it is possible to have a fraught insight into the person who literally gave birth to you. It’s not easy, and it never will be. As seen in Belle’s personality and challenges she came across, while there’s resentment and a semblance of hate towards Noelle, there’s that underlying feeling of loving her all the same. That, in my opinion, is the pinnacle of what Mona Awad is trying to achieve here—love despite it all. Love as the result of hard work, of misunderstandings, of failures. Love as in the one that saves them both in the end.


And then there’s beauty, specifically achieving that idealized version of yourself. In the beginning, Belle is unsatisfied. She is always too much of the wrong thing. She is always lacking in the things that make other people beautiful. So she puts on so much skincare, so many ampoules and serums that will make her just like her mother—a symbol of beauty and good looks. Does she achieve that? Of course not. So, she goes to Rouge. Think of it as a spa, a treatment center, where you’ll become what you’ve always wanted. In reality, it’s much more dangerous, much more ominous than that. Because of course, it is. Nothing is as it seems, and I think Awad holds so much regard for things turning sour if you want it badly. Perhaps the trick here is to pretend you don’t want something to get it. In this reality, playing hard to get might be the key to a happy ending. But who knows, there’s always going to be a fuck-up close by so I guess you might as well wish hard for that thing after all.

Anyway, at this point, Awad has that formula down to the tee—”X is unsatisfied with her reality. X goes to Y, discovers herself. At Y, she realizes that she wants to go back because of (terrible, sinister truth). Good news: she does. Bad news: trouble ensues as soon as she goes back.” This rings true for All’s Well, Bunny, and now, Rouge. While it is easy to get through these things, especially since you’re already expecting what will happen, it does lose its magic, the Mona magic if you will. I enjoyed the mind fuckery, but I do admit that it gets old when you’re three books in, and all stories kind of blend into one another. 


Overall, it was a good read to get lost in. It reeled me in with Belle’s relationship with her mother. The bait was sweet and intriguing. However, I got tired of biting. I still finished it, of course, but I don’t think I’ll think about it for a long time.

this was an okay read. didn’t feel like a waste of time even though right in the middle i felt like it was going nowhere. my curiosity kept me going, though. 

there is something about the writing that is too intentional that even stuff that’s supposed to be satirical, kind of falls flat for me. it has a strong commentary on the how predatory the beauty industry can be for women, and i can imagine how it would pack a punch for people who don’t realize that yet, but it was just okay for me. i found some unnecessary facets of the story (like certain characters) that i didn’t feel belong at all, like if the characters weren’t there it wouldn’t change any of the outcome. 

the book did end on a hopeful note and i did like how touching the resolution was - mirabelle’s reconciliation with her mother, her acceptance of her grief. one thing i also like was how the book explores the very specific mother-daughter dynamic between biracial/brown daughters and their white mothers. it’s a dynamic that i myself don’t experience, so i had an eye-opening experience regarding that while reading.

Nova

this was an okay read. didn’t feel like a waste of time even though right in the middle i felt like it was going nowhere. my curiosity kept me going, though. 

there is something about the writing that is too intentional that even stuff that’s supposed to be satirical, kind of falls flat for me. it has a strong commentary on the how predatory the beauty industry can be for women, and i can imagine how it would pack a punch for people who don’t realize that yet, but it was just okay for me. i found some unnecessary facets of the story (like certain characters) that i didn’t feel belong at all, like if the characters weren’t there it wouldn’t change any of the outcome. 

the book did end on a hopeful note and i did like how touching the resolution was - mirabelle’s reconciliation with her mother, her acceptance of her grief. one thing i also like was how the book explores the very specific mother-daughter dynamic between biracial/brown daughters and their white mothers. it’s a dynamic that i myself don’t experience, so i had an eye-opening experience regarding that while reading.

Mommy issues galore 😅 I found this to be more disturbing than Bunny but less fun/punchier. 

Mel 

I’m Awad’s books there is always about 20% in the middle of the book that just makes me confused and doubtful that it will wrap up in a satisfying way, and then I blink and I have just finished the most amazing, fundamentally life changing book. Rouge had Awad’s mastered out-of-her-mind narration, and the interesting insertion of second-person narration through the first person narration that invites a reader to examine their role in beauty culture through their relation to the story. Of course, this book is about the exploitative heart of capital-B Beauty. It’s also about being served self-hatred and envy from a young age, discontent with your body learned from the floor next to your mother’s vanity, not because your mother was teaching it but because she sat next to her mother’s too. The exploration of the mother-daughter dynamics is what made this book a home run for me. That and the message that you do not have to succumb to the pressure of Beauty, you can still waltz out of it to the shore.

Emily McMeans

so sorry i could not move past the tom cruise of it it all 

petrina

creepy yet fun, surprisingly made me cry over my mother. 

donna 

Cate

Gothic, atmospheric, slow, deranged, and captivating…. ?

Spiral along with a protagonist whom, after her mother’s demise, realises generational trauma has a different meaning in her case.

Rabia Sitabi

Gothic, atmospheric, slow, deranged, and captivating…. ?

Spiral along with a protagonist whom, after her mother’s demise, realises generational trauma has a different meaning in her case.

Gelaine Trinidad

3.25/5 
hypnotizing
weird
as expected from Mona Awad. 
too many Tom Cruise references for my liking.
I guess I have to watch  Eyes Wide Shut  now.

You have to wait till you’re halfway through the book before you hit the juicy stuff and Mirabelle gets interesting. You kinda feel like you’re floating through a mist the whole time because the MC is so confused all the time. Also, the repetitive word choices became irritating. But I loved the themes and vibes once we got to the back half. 

Jess Rez

armoni mayes

i DNF’d this at 90%. i stopped reading around 50% and bought the audiobook so i could just try to push through but i couldn’t even finish that. this was a snoozfest so so so boring. like the plot doesn’t even really get started until page 250 and it’s still slow and boring. i LOVED bunny and it’s much better than Rouge. and the tom cruise thing was just so annoying

Jerilynn Hallett 

i'm a noted fan of mona awad and her work, often likening the experience as a reader as what i assume an intense trip would feel like, left a bit lost and in slight awe of the twists and turns of the mind. 

that being said, i think rouge is easily mona awad at her most surreal. i feel this is the shortest amount of time i have felt grounded in any sort of physical reality reading one of her works, and it was certainly an endeavor to weave your reader in and out of various levels of consciousness for over 300 pages. 

there was a point where i feared that she may have actually lost me. the inner monologues and streams of consciousness felt almost too similar to what she delivers in 

, a woman losing herself, though what they were chasing was slightly different. but she managed to recapture me with what has caught me time and time again - the relationship between a daughter and her mother, the way that relationship morphs over time and shifts in perspective. 

in the end, i did find myself feeling slightly victorious at the end, championed by the idea of love and how it can reach us. the ways grief unfolds us. 

if you've read mona awad before, you get about exactly what you expect from it. the problem is, three books in, i'm not entirely sure yet if that's a good thing. while i did have a good time, i'm not sure i'd be as eager to read another iteration of this story. i'm not sure how far this allure extends. like any trip, i suppose you build a tolerance over time. the dizzying effect loses some of its magic, the loose ends become taunting rather than mysterious. that being said, i yet again enjoyed the ride, and for now awad will continue to have a bit of a fan in me. 

tiff <3

i'm a noted fan of mona awad and her work, often likening the experience as a reader as what i assume an intense trip would feel like, left a bit lost and in slight awe of the twists and turns of the mind. 

that being said, i think rouge is easily mona awad at her most surreal. i feel this is the shortest amount of time i have felt grounded in any sort of physical reality reading one of her works, and it was certainly an endeavor to weave your reader in and out of various levels of consciousness for over 300 pages. 

there was a point where i feared that she may have actually lost me. the inner monologues and streams of consciousness felt almost too similar to what she delivers in all's well, a woman losing herself, though what they were chasing was slightly different. but she managed to recapture me with what has caught me time and time again - the relationship between a daughter and her mother, the way that relationship morphs over time and shifts in perspective. 

in the end, i did find myself feeling slightly victorious at the end, championed by the idea of love and how it can reach us. the ways grief unfolds us. 

if you've read mona awad before, you get about exactly what you expect from it. the problem is, three books in, i'm not entirely sure yet if that's a good thing. while i did have a good time, i'm not sure i'd be as eager to read another iteration of this story. i'm not sure how far this allure extends. like any trip, i suppose you build a tolerance over time. the dizzying effect loses some of its magic, the loose ends become taunting rather than mysterious. that being said, i yet again enjoyed the ride, and for now awad will continue to have a bit of a fan in me. 

absolutely loved this weird story about a woman who gets sucked into a beauty cult her mother had previously belonged to. it’s just insane, maddening, and perfect. a great commentary on the evils of the beauty industry, a great depiction of a complicated mother/daughter relationship, and another great work by mona awad. have yet to be disappointed by her work and i look forward to reading anything else her brilliant, terrifying mind comes up with!

sarah ˚ʚ♡ɞ˚

Promo should have focused on the mother - daughter relationship rather than the supposed commentary on the beauty industry. It is where this book's core actually lies and it also puts it into more flattering company since pretty much everything it is trying to do, "Natural Beauty" by Ling Ling Huang does better.

The surreal elements that make the book feel like a bad trip were good and the narration of the audiobook is some of the best I have heard. But in spite of that the novel felt overall repetitive and overly long.

Promo should have focused on the mother - daughter relationship rather than the supposed commentary on the beauty industry. It is where this book's core actually lies and it also puts it into more flattering company since pretty much everything it is trying to do, "Natural Beauty" by Ling Ling Huang does better.

The surreal elements that make the book feel like a bad trip were good and the narration of the audiobook is some of the best I have heard. But in spite of that the novel felt overall repetitive and overly long.

trippy, heart warming, and a custom for mona awad, confusing as hell. the apotheosis is upon us!

I was so taken with the fever dream of this book, pulled into Belle’s grief over the loss of her mother juxtaposed against the sunny bright of California and then the deep red of Rouge. 

The surrealism and skin-care play came were a delight, but sometimes reading felt tedious. The rabbit hole of the Tom Cruise mirror felt like an allegory I couldn’t untangle. And by midway, I felt like one of the floating jellyfish, nothing propelled me forward until the very end when we swim out to sea. 

I have to admit that I thought Bunny was more successful. But maybe I just favor east coast neuroticism to west coast laidback cool.

I was so taken with the fever dream of this book, pulled into Belle’s grief over the loss of her mother juxtaposed against the sunny bright of California and then the deep red of Rouge. 

The surrealism and skin-care play came were a delight, but sometimes reading felt tedious. The rabbit hole of the Tom Cruise mirror felt like an allegory I couldn’t untangle. And by midway, I felt like one of the floating jellyfish, nothing propelled me forward until the very end when we swim out to sea. 

I have to admit that I thought Bunny was more successful. But maybe I just favor east coast neuroticism to west coast laidback cool.

🌹🌹🌹

farrah 

actual rating: 2.75 (maybe a soft 3?)

admittedly, i struggled to understand a lot of what was happening in this which dampened my enjoyment. it felt like reading all’s well again, but an even more confusing, disorienting version with mentions of tom cruise ??? 

i do enjoy depictions of complicated mother/daughter relationships and this did deliver on that front

mic shulman

OKAY I know it seems like I have been hating all the books I’ve started to read recently BUT you have to understand that we simply are meshing. I started this book knowing skincare isn’t that compelling for me, but I wanted to feel that mystery and it simply isn’t there for me. Sorry. 