Mirabelle Nour used to have a very close relationship with her single mother, Noelle. When Belle was younger, it was just the two of them --- and the beautiful Noelle’s long string of boyfriends.

Belle might never have thought she’d want to grow up to follow in her mother’s footsteps. But here she is, a single woman working in a fancy dress shop just like the one Noelle owns (though in Montreal in Belle’s case, not in Southern California where Noelle moved when Belle was a young teen). And Belle has taken the family preoccupation with beauty to a whole new level. She obsessively watches and rewatches the videos of her favorite beauty influencer. Thanks to the many products recommended on that channel, she has an elaborate and time-consuming skincare routine that she practices morning and night, much like a religious ceremony.

"ROUGE is a dark, atmospheric indictment of our beauty-obsessed culture and the Hollywood image factory that fuels it. It’s also about mothers and daughters, and one young woman’s attempts to define herself apart from her mother’s gaze."

Noelle is not that old and seems even younger (thanks, perhaps, to her own intricate beauty routines). So it’s a surprise, to put it mildly, when Belle gets a call and learns that Noelle has died after falling off a seaside cliff near her home in La Jolla. Thinking back, Belle recalls that her mother had seemed unusually distant and distracted during their last few phone calls, struggling to recall basic words and forgetting key elements of their history together. If Belle had thought of it at all, she would have chalked it up to early dementia. But after she arrives in La Jolla and begins speaking with her mother’s friends and acquaintances, she starts to wonder if something else might have been going on.

Belle is more than eager to return to her life in Montreal after the funeral, but settling her mother’s financial affairs proves more complicated than expected. Soon she has a reason to stay, after a mysterious woman in red who attended the funeral invites her to a secret party at an elusive mansion that also appears to be a spa. What’s more, thanks to her relationship with Noelle, who was also a client, Belle is offered one of the rare opportunities to partake in their beauty treatments for free. After that first treatment, Belle feels utterly transformed, so much so that her new La Jolla acquaintances barely seem to recognize her. And she’s feeling ever more removed from her old life in Montreal, instead traveling back to the mansion whenever she can and also traveling back in her memories to a dark episode from her childhood when she once betrayed Noelle.

As Belle becomes more detached from reality, her first-person narration in Mona Awad’s novel grows increasingly abstract and dreamlike as well. Like some other gothic horror novels, ROUGE can prompt readers to constantly question the lines between reality and fantasy, between the waking world and a nightmare. Awad also amps up the horror by showing her audience the reactions (somewhere between perplexed and terrified) that others have when they see Belle after each of her “treatments.” But she never really describes what has changed in her appearance, what exactly causes them to react with such confusion, even repulsion. As far as Belle is concerned, she’s becoming more beautiful. But is she really?

ROUGE is a dark, atmospheric indictment of our beauty-obsessed culture and the Hollywood image factory that fuels it. It’s also about mothers and daughters, and one young woman’s attempts to define herself apart from her mother’s gaze.