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.