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This one feels similar to Mona Awad's Rouge but with less focus on grief and more on how privilege and racism inform beauty standards and how wealth can take a reasonable idea to an unreasonable extreme. I enjoyed the novel, but the story feels a little young, like it's lacking a layer of meaning that life experience might give it. Or maybe that was part of the point.

⭐️⭐️⭐️💫

I‘m here for fiction that explores the darkness of the beauty and wellness industry. “Natural Beauty” additionally delves into cultural identity. The most moving parts of the story for me were with the protagonist and her immigrant parents. The true horror is found in contemplating that these storylines aren‘t implausible… how far are people really willing to go for beauty and power? Who sets the standards? Who pays the price? 🎧

Just started this and so far it‘s weird and compelling ;)

#Scarathlon #SpookyGhostClub @Clwojick

This book mixes horror with speculative fiction while presenting thoughtful social commentary about the beauty industry and the lengths people go to in order to be deemed beautiful by society.

The second half of this book goes a bit off the rails, but I was more than happy to hang on tight and enjoy the wild ride.

This was a shocking story that blended themes of coming of age, mystery, and horror. There were quite a few underlying messages in this book about being driven to perfection and the tool it take on us as young women. It looks at the beauty industry from an interesting perspective. It was fun but not my favorite. Horror rarely is my chosen genre, but nevertheless, I enjoyed it and was also shocked by a lot of the narrative. ⭐⭐⭐

I read five books in September and enjoyed them all!

"At least she was beautiful while it lasted. She was really very ordinary before..." This, in an essence, sums up this strange, beautiful, body-horror novel of the wellness & skincare industry. Things get gross, graphic, & very brutal, but it's all for that transient spell of beauty. How is beauty so soul-affirming when pursued through creative means (the arts) but so damaging when it's about manipulating insecurities via potions & procedures?

I tried to read this. I really did. It‘s like a fever dream mixed with MidSommar-like situational disassociations and some sexual violence. Felt like a bad trip. Bailed hard.

This book was SO interesting and SO good. It was such a good mix of psychological horror, whimsy, and real life implications. It also talked a lot about heritage and culture and assimilation which connects to the summer class I‘m taking which is pretty cool. Also i love anything that attracts suspicion to the wealthy

Ohhh this was great! It reminds me a bit of Our Wives Under The Sea, just that speculative fiction that seems normal but the more you read the weirder things get and you want to stop the characters but also cannot look away. These are some of my favorite books and I think this one will be with me for a long while.
So many?? About beauty and how far will people go, also how complacent are "you" questions I find fascinating.

Haunting. Beautiful. Horrifying.

The first half of this book is a great scathing critique of the “wellness” industry and I really enjoyed it. But the second half becomes a dystopia wherein dream and reality were hard for me to parse. I love a dystopia, but it felt like too radical a shift and didn‘t work for me.

This riveting read builds with mounting horror as the main character starts a job in an exclusive beauty shop that sells supplements, creams, potions & cosmetics- along with treatments that seem to have spectacular results. But it‘s soon clear that things aren‘t quite as natural as they are purported to be… Body-horror, plenty of fodder to discuss beauty in today‘s standards as well as artistic expression and growing up feeling like an outsider.

Wow, this is bizarre. This is the literary horror story of a piano prodigy who falls on hard times and ends up working for Holistik, a high end store for organic beauty products and treatments, only to discover the dark underbelly of a corporation focused on a singular “objective” standard of beauty and pursuing it at all costs. The writing has beautiful moments of profundity balanced with the grotesque. A #netgalley and my March #doublespin