“Looking back, it seems like I had instinctively known that the most effective place to prune myself was at the roots.”

Natural Beauty is a unique novel following a young pianist with immigrant parents, now chronically ill after a car crash, who gets caught up in the world of holistic health and wellness.

I liked this one a lot, though something prevented me from loving it. I do love the foreshadowing and themes in this book. It feels as though every detail is purposeful, and wraps the whole story up in a bow

(a great example is the recurrence of the characters fingers being relevant to the plot.)

There are moments that I felt there was too much exposition, but the most important plot points

(the parents car crash as well as their death due to the supplements, for example)

weren’t fed to the reader. The body horror is super disturbing so, well done on that front! The build up to the climax was well done, though I do feel it meandered in the middle. The sub-plot semi-“love” story, though certainly not poorly done, felt a bit out of place and incomplete. There were a lot of moments that felt that they lingered too long or went to fast.

I really like the themes. Beauty standards, race, lineage, taking advantage of women, and all of the things people will do to fit in. It all felt a tiny bit obvious at points, though I don’t think it needed to be more subtle either. It’s a book I definitely enjoyed in its subject, and it was fun for me as someone who has always been fascinated by health and wellness (from the genuine ways to take care of one’s body to the super crazy scams) to laugh at how ludicrous some products and treatments were. There was realism in that. Perhaps Gwyneth Paltrow is the irl Victor (only 3/4 kidding.) 

So, mixed feelings here. I need to let it sit for a while. If Ling Ling Huang releases more books, I’ll certainly given them a read!

It’s a self-centered comparison, but this book reminds me slightly of the first “novel” (obviously unpublished) that I wrote. I dunno how to feel about that. Weird feeling to get reading something.

“I enjoy the immense freedom that comes with being safe from desire. And it is a kind of power to embrace ugliness and its possibility of expression, so much more imaginative than beauty.”