A review by emergencily
Natural Beauty by Ling Ling Huang

3.5

  • i'll grant that this was a page-turner because i wanted to know what would happen next, but i was disappointed at how predictably everything played out
  • this horror/thriller book follows the chinese-american female protagonist, who, having left her promising pianist career, is now working dead-end jobs to support the medical care of her parents after a car accident. she lands a job at a retail store that is part of an expansive beauty & healthcare empire, whose controversial and experimental treatments are reminiscent of gwyneth paltrow's goop. as part of the job, she is expected to participate in increasingly invasive and disturbingly transformative beauty procedures
  • the book satirizes the superficial and capitalistic self-care & beauty industry, while critiquing eurocentric & misogynistic beauty standards, and highlights the horrors of reproductive control -- but it does all of this in such a predictably obvious way that it really ends up being rather uninteresting
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