Many thanks to NetGalley and Little, Brown and Company for gifting me a digital ARC of the debut novel by Sarah Wang. All opinions expressed in this review are my own - 3.5 stars rounded up!
At twenty-six, Linli Feng is still trying to escape her mother Fanny’s orbit. But after three years of estrangement, just when Linli has been accepted into a prestigious graduate program, she is dragged back by Fanny’s latest medical catastrophe and forced to return home. For decades, Fanny has been addicted to plastic surgery, and now Fanny has won a spot on America’s Beauty Extreme, a reality television competition in which botched plastic surgery addicts compete for reconstructive surgery. When Linli attempts to rescue Fanny from the sinister subculture that has already claimed her mother’s face, she must at last confront the corrosive reality of American success that is at the fraught heart of their relationship.
This was a solid debut and brings up so many interesting topics - mother/daughter relationships, family secrets, and the chase of whatever is considered beautiful. The extremes that people will go to in order to achieve what they think is beautiful runs the gamut from hair dye to botox to the extreme plastic surgeries depicted in this book. Plus, that beauty bar keeps changing, as we've seen lately with the very skinny celebrities. In addition, the damage done to daughters seeing their mothers striving for perfection is big. A thoughtful debut - looking forward to more from this author!
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