Book Box: Dark tales of the beauty industry, parasites and more
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
Follow topic:
SINGAPORE – The Straits Times reviews three Gothic fairy tales in this week’s Book Box. Buy the books at Amazon
Book review: Mona Awad’s Rouge is a ravishing Gothic skincare novel told in a fairy-tale voice
Mona Awad, named by Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood as her "literary heir apparent", returns with a ravishing fourth novel that satirises the beauty industry.
PHOTOS: SCRIBNER, ANGELA STERLING
“Each morning we must arm ourselves,” incants the cultish voice of beauty guru Marva through Mirabelle’s screen, “against the many free radicals and pollutants that assail the air, leaving their unsightly oxidising marks on our epidermis”.
Mirabelle’s mother is dead. But flying back from Montreal for Noelle Des Jardin’s funeral – a party, as they call it in California – all she can think of is Marva’s voice urging her to follow her skincare routine: Botanical Resurrection Serum, Diamond-Infused Revitalising Eye Formula, Orpheus Flower Peptide Complex.
Mirabelle takes after her mother, who obsesses over fair skin and eternal youth, although the daughter has always felt she cannot quite live up to her mother’s beauty. (Her dead father, as Noelle tells a young Mirabelle in the book’s haunting fairy-tale prologue, was from a place where people were “darker and they were hairier”.)
Canadian novelist Mona Awad, born to an Egyptian father and a French-Canadian mother, plays with tropes of beauty in well-known fairy tales of Snow White and Beauty And The Beast in Rouge, and renovates them for the contemporary readership.
Book review: Hiron Ennes creates parasitic body horror in debut novel Leech
Hiron Ennes' Leech balances the atmospheric dread of Gothic horror with post-apocalyptic dystopia, yet succeeds in transcending both these genres.
PHOTOS: TORDOTCOM
In the remote Chateau de Verdira, up in the wintry north, the only doctor in the area has mysteriously died. An autopsy by the Interprovincial Medical Institute discovers, clinging to the corpse’s left eye, a black, hair-like substance with a life of its own – a parasite.
This is troubling for the Institute, because the doctor’s body was already hosting a parasite: them. Now, it seems, they have competition.
“Leech” refers to a blood-sucking parasitic worm. It is also a derogatory archaic term for a doctor, leeches having been used for medical purposes since ancient times. American writer Hiron Ennes’ debut novel merges these two meanings with stunning, sickening effect.
The ravaged world of Leech has been dominated for centuries by the Institute, a parasitical hive mind that possesses promising young hosts, replacing their individual selves to shape them into the perfect physicians. Now they are everywhere in thousands of bodies, curing and cutting up humanity, connected and controlled by a single consciousness.
Book review: Etaf Rum’s Evil Eye compassionate if procedural telling of a mother of two finding her own way
Evil Eye is the second novel by Palestinian-American author Etaf Rum.
PHOTOS: ANGELA BLANKENSHIP, TIMES DISTRIBUTION
There is hope and courage in this second novel by Palestinian-American author Etaf Rum, which follows a Muslim mother of two as she gains the confidence to finally leave a stifling and loveless marriage.
The interest comes in Yara’s wrangling with her own guilt at feeling discontented, despite her improved circumstances in America. Her mother was a bitter victim of domestic abuse and her grandmother lives in the refugee camps of Palestine.
The Gothic conceit of having been cursed, as a fortune teller informs Yara’s mother, holds the three generations of women together.
Without the vocabulary for depression – or at least having been taught to internalise a deep suspicion of psychiatry – Yara clutches a hamsa necklace given to her by her mother, meant to offer protection from others’ envy.
But Rum chooses a tone firmly tuned to the realistic and the scientific. The evil eye charm is less effective for Yara than finally peering into her mother’s eyes and coming to terms with her past.
The Straits Times’ Weekly Bestsellers Oct 21
PHOTOS: HANOVER SQUARE PRESS, MACMILLAN
This week’s bestsellers include titles from Toshikazu Kawaguchi, Thomas Erikson and John Patrick Green.
