Linli Feng was eight years old the first time her mother, Fanny, got plastic surgery. She is now in her mid-20s, and Fanny has since subjected her face to more and more extreme treatments, many of which were conducted by unlicensed practitioners or using unregulated processes. When Linli thinks back over her life, she feels like her mother was only really hers until that first surgery. Now, it's like Fanny is a stranger, each successive surgery taking her further and further away. 

"NEW SKIN is at times funny, but it's not always an easy read.... What could have been a jokey or satirical approach becomes something much darker and more intense in Sarah Wang's debut novel."

Three years ago, Linli moved from Los Angeles to Washington state, finally escaping from the codependent relationship she shared with her increasingly bizarre-looking mother. Now, though, just as she's about to depart for a prestigious graduate program in New York City, which will enable her to help vulnerable women, her mom's own vulnerabilities are sucking her back in. After yet another botched nose job, Fanny develops disturbing side effects, causing Linli to derail her own plans and instead spend her days alongside Fanny as she convalesces. The two of them watch episode after episode of a popular reality show about plastic surgery, “America's Beauty.” 

However, their claustrophobic existence is disrupted when Fanny is arrested and charged with providing false statements to law enforcement. She claimed not to know the identities of the illegal practitioners targeting her and other largely immigrant, working-class women with harmful surgical procedures. Fanny is convinced that she can solve all their problems when she scores a spot on a spinoff reality show, “America's Beauty Extreme,” which promises the winner full reconstructive surgery to fix the plastic surgery blunders that landed them on the program in the first place.

While Linli watches Fanny compete --- at times brilliantly and certainly strategically --- she grows determined to clear her mother's name by uncovering the plastic surgery ring herself. Her investigation draws her deep into this dark underside of Los Angeles society and reveals how the vast divides marked by race, class and immigration status extend even as far as the beauty industry. It also runs the risk of drawing Linli herself into the trap of these practitioners, begging the question: Will she follow in her mother's footsteps?

NEW SKIN is at times funny, but it's not always an easy read. The description of various procedures and their aftermath, as well as the occasional vivid and shocking images that sometimes creep into Linli's first-person narration, might make readers feel uneasy or on edge. What could have been a jokey or satirical approach becomes something much darker and more intense in Sarah Wang's debut novel. Elements of horror start to creep in around the edges, and the sometimes tongue-in-cheek exploration of beauty culture and reality television becomes a far deeper interrogation over what it means to become American.