A review by alexture
Natural Beauty by Ling Ling Huang

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

Natural Beauty has stayed with me for a few weeks. I wasn’t going to write about it here, because I didn’t find it significant or likeable enough. And here I am a month later, still browsing through the list and feeling… something, when I scroll past the name of this book. 

I say « something » because I really don’t know what is going on here. Natural Beauty is such a short little horror novel, and yet it touches on so much. The body horror is engrossing (and also just gross), but it goes so much further than that − to the point that it feels like the least awful part of the book, in a sense. 

I found the book very similar to The Centre in a way, with its horror take on cultural appropriation. Others talk about this with more sensitivity and knowledge than myself, including the author herself. 

To me, the main topics were grief and body image. I could have chosen half a dozen more − pressure to perform, conformity, identity, being your parents’ caregiver, awful roommates, bisexuality − but these two stayed with me. The way grief makes you give up on what you love the most and pulls you down into this spiral. The way your body image makes you ignorant of what’s happening in your own mirror until it’s too late to understand that something else happened to your body. It’s good. It’s really good.