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Book Review: Rouge by Mona Awad
When Belle’s semi-estranged mother dies falling off a cliff in California, she comes from Montreal for the funeral and soon finds herself sucked into the same “spa” her mother was frequenting before her death.
Summary:
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.
Review:
Imagine a woman gets pulled into the world of Eyes Wide Shut, only there’s a lot less clarity about what exactly is going on.
The first 10% of the book and the last 25% had me very interested. The middle felt a little repetitive and slow. On the plus side, this book put me to sleep so easily. I can’t remember the last time I fell asleep so quickly when reading. Maybe not a huge positive to say about a horror book, but something about the language and the setting lulled me right to sleep. I only started to be able to make progress when I began to skim. I think the lengthy descriptions of the skin care routine just wasn’t particularly interesting to me as someone who simply doesn’t do skincare.
The main character is half Egyptian, half white. Her Egyptian father died so she lives with her white mother. A lot of the book is about the conflicts that arise for her as a woman of color with a white mother. I liked how the book illuminated the mistakes Belle’s mother made as a white woman raising an Egyptian daughter while also showing how she still loved her daughter and was trying. It’s a delicate balance to strike, and it was well done. She is also bisexual. This is established by her dating two siblings, which wasn’t my favorite way of revealing that. It’s a little too close to the bisexual as cheater trope.
What exactly was going on at the spa and how it ties back to Belle’s childhood remains a little confusing to me, even after reading the ending. I think I understand it. But I suppose what confuses me the most (minor spoiler) is how this society could target people from the other side of the continent many years in advance, and what made them target those specific people. That was a bit fuzzy to me. (Read more about what others thought about the confusing bits here. Be warned – there’s a lot of spoilers in that link!) I also agree with others who say the romance subplot wasn’t needed. I would have been quite happy with full focus on Belle and her mother.
I really enjoyed the way the sentences were put together, even if I thought the story overall could have been tightened. The story itself is interesting, although definitely drawing inspiration from others that I felt were creepier and with a more straight-forward big bad.
Recommended to those willing to dive into scenes of a character’s skin-care routine and atmospherically vague reveals that let you choose what you think happened. I am certain these readers are out there, and I hope they find this book. It feels almost like a love letter to that audience.
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3 out of 5 stars
Length: 384 pages – average but on the longer side
Source: Library
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Book Review: The Cormorant by Chuck Wendig (Series, #3)
Summary:
Miriam Black is on her own once again after sending her truck driver boyfriend to the curb. She’s taken to periodically messing with fate by killing the killers she sees in her visions of the deaths of the people she touches. When she gets an offer on Craigslist to read someone’s future death in Florida, it comes at a time when she can’t pass it up, as a recently homeless person. She heads to Florida figuring she might also tackle the demon of her relationship with her mother. Two birds, one stone. But Florida ends up being much more than a quick job and a quick visit.
Review:
I snatch up a new Miriam Black book the first chance I get because I so love the prose style of the books (I’m uncertain if Wendig’s other books read similarly, as I haven’t read any), and I also love Miriam as a character very much (I would definitely run the other way if I spotted her on the street at night). This third entry in the series didn’t disappoint, although I periodically wondered if Miriam’s bad-assness would be sacrificed for character growth.
The urban fantasy world of Miriam Black continues to be slowly fleshed out in this book. We meet a couple more characters with supernatural abilities, not exactly Miriam’s but similar in that they function in the mind. We also start to understand what might cause such a thing to happen. And how Wendig presents this information is beautifully crafted. It is a part of the story, a wonderful example of showing not telling.
Miriam doesn’t just cause chaos and get away with it, and this book fairly clearly exists to show us that Miriam is not invincible, even if she may sometimes seem it in earlier books. She’s a tough broad with a mental gift brutally acquired, and she’s trying to figure out how to function and do the right thing in this incredibly fucked up situation where she is battling unknown forces, particularly fate.
The plot forces Miriam to confront two bad specters from her past: an ex lover and her mother. I was fine with confronting the ex lover, and how it went down made sense. I was incredibly wary of her confrontations with her mother. Her mother was established as a fundamentalist abusive ball of shit in the previous books, and I was deeply concerned that Wendig was going to try to either make it seem like it was all in Miriam’s head or offer redemption for her. And the plot does sometimes dance on the edge of doing one or the other of these. But the way Miriam reacts to her mother in their confrontations help keep it grounded and realistic that not all mothers are great people. In one confrontation she tells her mother,
Don’t act surprised that I have this cyanide cocktail in my heart. Like they say on that old dumb-ass drug commercial: I learned it by watching you. (loc 1824)
On the other hand, an awful lot of the plot revolves around Miriam saving her mother from her untimely death at the hands of a kidnapper. I just have a hard time believing, especially given the vitriol Miriam has felt for her mother this entire time, that she would actually care that much if her mother dies. I get it that Miriam might very much not want the kidnapper to get away with it, because she hates him and he’s fucking with her, but I don’t think Miriam would actually get misty-eyed at the thought of her mother’s untimely demise. It felt forced instead of being Miriam. That said, the plot does manage to stick to its guns enough that Miriam comes out of the situation still seeming like her cyanide-filled self, so I can’t fault it too much for veering that close to the edge.
I would be amiss not to mention the fact that his book establishes the fact that Miriam is bisexual. Of course, she refuses to use the term herself, and I’m fairly certain no one actually ever calls her bi. Normally a bi character refusing to call herself bi would drive me batty, but Miriam refusing labels fits 100% into her character. She doesn’t see the need to label who she fucks and other characters’ attempts to figure her out are met with disgust on her part but that’s how she feels about everything about herself. Yes, I wish more functional non-cyanide cocktail hearted characters were bi, but I also am pretty darn happy that a character I enjoy so much is bi. Plus, scenes of Miriam banging a woman were an unexpected utter delight.
The plot does a great job of being both a single book conflict and something that ultimately propels the overarching plot forward, which is exactly what one hopes for from a series book.
The writing style maintains its gritty sharpness that the series has enjoyed from the beginning. Both the narration and the conversations are a pleasure to read. Passages like those listed below are peppered throughout the book, accosting the reader with the knowledge that we are in Miriam’s world now.
Meetings are like black holes: they eat up the hours, they suck in the light, they gorge on his productivity. (loc 92)
I’m a certified bad-ass indestructible bitch. The sun tries to burn me, I’ll kick him in his fiery balls. I don’t need no stinking suntan lotion. (loc 2787)
Overall, this book brings most things readers have come to expect from a Miriam Black book. A gritty female main character with hard-hitting prose and a plot with a touch of the fantastic and grotesque. Some fans might be a bit disappointed by the direction Miriam’s relationship with her mother goes, but all readers will be pumped by the ending and eagerly anticipating the next entry. Recommended that fans of the first two books pick this one asap.
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4 out of 5 stars
Length: 384 pages – average but on the longer side
Source: Gift
Previous Books in Series:
Blackbirds, review
Mockingbird
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This work by Amanda Nevius is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Opinions of a Wolf 