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.
Darkly comic and squirm-inducing ... Awad’s prose slithers and shimmies. Ultimately, the disturbing vibes cohere into a fairy tale whose rules and ancient monsters are terribly clear ... Awad brings her story to a powerful conclusion that reaches deep into the mother-daughter relationship, finding a heartbreaking tenderness within.
A gothic comedy ... At times, Rouge could have benefited from an editor ... Its style is as maximalist as Belle’s skin care routine ... Literature is another kind of transformative experience: not just a rendezvous with the self but a mirror reflecting that self’s relation to the world. Rouge points to many discomfiting truths about being a woman in the 21st century, which can sometimes feel an awful lot like gothic horror.
The beauty – pun intended – of Awad’s fascinating literary experiment lies in her lyrical, almost dreamlike use of language and in her employment of archetypal symbols to illustrate a very modern fairytale ... At its heart, Rouge is not so much a fairytale as a vampire story ... The trancelike, rhapsodic language and deepening atmosphere of unreality make for a narrative that oozes with unease. The sense of threat is palpable, and Awad handles her material with enthusiasm, imagination and a refined knowledge of her sources. As the book wears on, however, I could not help feeling that the symbolism, like rouge too generously applied, becomes a little obvious ... For me at least, the balance between the real and the imagined in Rouge is out of kilter, and by the novel’s end I was left feeling I’d poked my head down this particular rabbit hole once too often.
