Rouge Book Review
“‘So I can pay, then,’ I say. ‘For what you’ve done to me. Making me moonbright.’ Making my mind an empty pool, I think, more complaining. Will it ever fill back up with fish?”
CW/TW: racism, parental death, child grooming/child abuse, mental health struggles, almost drowning, memory loss/loss of identity, gore
check out a complete list at The StoryGraph
Rouge by Mona Awad
Snow White meets Eyes Wide Shut in this cryptic journey following Mirabelle. A young woman whose obsession for beauty and skincare has consumed her life.
After the sudden death of her mother, Mirabelle is sent to Southern California to empty her home and consolidate her (hefty) debts.
Things aren’t as they seem, and as Mirabelle unravels the truth behind her mother’s passing, you’re left on the edge of your seat wondering if she too will succumb to the same sinister fate.
Welcome to our first PnP Book Club Blog post! In October, we read ROUGE by Mona Awad. This book was a TRIP y’all! It’s so disorienting, weird, creepy, and wild. It literally reads like a fever dream. So many WTF situations, I can’t even count.
Where neither Kendall or myself found this book actually scary, it was really, really creepy. Think bugs crawling along your skin vibes.
We liked it.
This is a great spooky season read, especially if you don’t mind kinda intense CW/TW, but it’s not true gore. There’s one scene that’s pretty disturbing, but it’s right at the book’s climax and over with pretty quick.
One closed-door spicy scene, but it was very much glossed over, alluded to, and not explicit in any way. Not sexy at all. It just kinda happened and then we moved on with the plot.
We gave this a good 4.25/5 Crystal Balls. We loved it, will probably read it again, but maybe not for a while. It’s immensely disorienting and we need to get our bearings straight before we jump back into Mirabelle’s crazy universe!
Tropes
unreliable narrator
magical objects
Cool Traits People Care About
mixed-race MC
LGBTQA+ MC
Vibes
surreal
fever dream
red wine
October
the smell of roses on a rainy day
We’ve read various reviews of this book and comparing our own experiences to reading Rouge, the most accurate description is that it reads like a fever dream.
The whole experience feels disorienting, like watching yourself make one bad decision after another, but you’re powerless to stop it. You’re seeing the world through an unreliable narrator, and the lines between reality and fantasy blur constantly. The atmosphere is thick with unease, like you're in a lucid dream that’s slowly turning into a nightmare.
The atmosphere is charged with tension, leaving you questioning everything, while a creeping sense of dread looms in the background. The whole time, you're thinking, "This can't be real," but at the same time, you know there's no way out.
Amazing Quotes
““The tank goes far beneath the main floor, so I must be deep under. Wow. It’s terribly beautiful up there. Primordial is a word that floats alone in the lagoon of my mind. I’m in the lagoon of my mind now. Deep in the lagoon, there’s a black box. A black box with many locks, like metal teeth. It lies there on the lagoon floor, half covered in silt. I feel the box open its black mouth.
And then?
I can’t feel my body at all anymore.””
“She smiles at me, but there’s something behind her smile. I see it, the opposite of her words.”
“If she did ask, I would say it was grief. The deepest of grief. I know she would accept that as an answer. No one knows what’s inside grief.
Anything at all can be there.”
Interview with Mona Awad discussed on podcast: HERE