Rouge: A Novel

Rouge by Mona Awad was published in 2023. It is a Gothic fairytale with elements of horror and focuses on the protagonist’s search for understanding after her mother’s death. She becomes involved with the same spa her mother frequented, which promises magical beauty and rejuvenation but has hidden costs. The novel critiques the beauty industry and explores themes of self-esteem, secrets, grief, repressed memory, and how identity is formed by childhood experiences and parental relationships.

Mona Awad is from Montreal, Canada, and moved to the United States in 2009. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University and a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Denver. Rouge incorporates surrealistic and horror elements that are present in her other works, including 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl (2016), which addresses diet culture; Bunny (2019), a dark academia story of an MFA program cult; and All’s Well (2021), in which a theater director dealing with substance use disorder attempts to stage Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well.

This guide refers to the 2024 Marysue Rucci Books edition.

Plot Summary

The novel’s protagonist, skincare-obsessed Mirabelle (Mira) Nour, travels from Montreal to California after learning that her mother, Noelle, died by falling from a cliff. Mira and Noelle had a fraught relationship, and Mira noticed a decline in her mother’s mental state during their last few phone calls. At the funeral, she sees a mysterious woman wearing a red dress, who tells Mira that Noelle “went the way of roses” (21). While drinking champagne at her hotel bar, Mira gets a message from a sender called “Rouge,” which contains a video of the same woman saying that the secret to skincare is within the human soul. Mira meets with Noelle’s lawyer, Chaz, who reveals her mother’s significant debts. She goes to her mother’s dress shop, Belle of the Ball, and finds that Noelle sold it to her former business partner, Sylvia, who has changed the shop’s aesthetic and wares.

Mira goes to her mother’s apartment and meets a young man named Tad—her mother’s lover—who is watering the plants and cleaning the windows. In a box, she finds clippings of Tom Cruise, her childhood dolls, and a pair of her mother’s red shoes. She puts on the shoes, and they lead her along the cliffside to a mansion. A plaque by the door tells her it is La Maison de Méduse, and a woman opens the door, telling Mira she is just in time. She realizes she has entered a spa and encounters the woman in red from the funeral and an impossibly beautiful set of twins. They address Mira as “Daughter of Noelle” or just “Daughter.” She is mesmerized by a tank of red jellyfish. When she sees a man she recognizes from the hotel bar and follows him down a hallway, they kiss, and he disappears.

Mira wakes at her mother’s apartment with no memory of returning home. During her next visit to the spa, she meets a beautiful girl who escorts her to a tank and instructs her to pull out a small, white jellyfish. The girl tells Mira that she and the jellyfish are going to go on a journey together. The next day, Mira encounters the woman in red at an antique shop, and she offers Mira a free treatment at Rouge.

Mira returns to La Maison de Méduse for her treatment and is treated like royalty. The treatment takes place in a room below the red jellyfish tank and starts as a normal facial. The esthetician talks about “extractions” and says memories are linked to the skin, and a screen emerges above Mira. She watches one of her memories in which she went into her mother’s room while she was out on a date. She put on her mother’s red shoes and found a broken mirror in the closet. In it, she saw a man she thought was Tom Cruise. He came through the mirror into the room, and they danced. He told her his name was Seth and that her mother had stolen Mira’s beauty from her.

After the treatment, Mira is disoriented. She can’t remember Tad and Chaz’s names, and she goes to Belle of the Ball and is disruptive. She attempts to return to La Maison de Méduse but is locked out, and she wanders along the cliff path. She thinks she hears her mother’s voice by the shoreline and begins to drown when she goes into the water. She is rescued by the man who kissed her, named Hud, who asks her about her treatment. He is jealous that she is a “Perfect Candidate” who is entitled to receive free treatments.

Mira returns for a second treatment and sees another memory about her deepening relationship with Seth, during which he plots to get rid of Noelle and take Mira away to California. Mira is even more disoriented after this treatment and wakes up looking drastically different. She begins to see her mother in mirrors and talks to her. She goes to Belle of the Ball again, and Sylvia threatens to call the police. Hud appears and escorts her home. He has been investigating Rouge because his brother was a member and disappeared. He notes that some people pay for treatments and don’t have serious effects, whereas “Perfect Candidates” receive free treatments but often disappear or die. Mira says she needs to go back to La Maison de Méduse, but he won’t let her go without him. She decides to seduce him, and they have sex. She sneaks out while he is asleep.

At La Maison de Méduse that evening, Hud finds her but is led away by a beautiful girl-woman who stupefies him. Seth appears and leads Mira downstairs for her third and final treatment. He takes a jellyfish from the tank and tells Mira it is “their story,” and they will finish it together. A memory plays: Seth instructed Mira to collect rose petals, grind them into dust, and put them in her mother’s face cream, hairbrush, and clothes. Noelle had a severe allergic reaction and was taken to the hospital. After this, Seth abandoned Mira, and the magic mirror shattered. Noelle moved to California alone, and Mira stayed behind with her grandmother in Montreal.

In the post-treatment room, Mira meets a woman she nicknames Lake due to the smoothness of her skin. Neither woman knows their own name. They line up with other women, and the woman in red tells them that they will be the guests of honor at a feast. They are all given new clothes and silver trays and enter a dining room near the top of the building, where the red jellyfish tank is open at the top. One jellyfish takes a particular interest in Mira and follows her. Figures in black are seated at the table. The woman in red introduces Seth as the guest of honor and says that he was influential in “planting” one of the “roses” in the room. Lake is selected to take a jellyfish from the tank and serve it to the diners. They eat it voraciously while it is still alive, and Lake screams in pain. The diners become more beautiful but are still hungry.

The woman in red announces that a “vessel” died before her jellyfish could be harvested, but she hopes her daughter can harvest both her own jellyfish soul and her mother’s. Mira is brought to the tank but refuses to pull the jellyfish out. The beautiful people suddenly look monstrous to her. She steps backward and falls into the tank, and Noelle’s jellyfish helps her escape through a hatch in the tank and into the ocean. The other jellyfish escape while the diners break the tanks, pursuing them. The house floods, but Noelle’s jellyfish helps Mira reach the shore. She morphs into Noelle, and the two women reconcile before Noelle disappears.

Sylvia finds Mira on the beach and takes her home with her to recover. She offers Mira a job in Belle of the Ball. Later, Mira sees Hud dancing on the beach and goes to him. He is confused and glowing, and she gently leads him out of the water.