Mona Awad absolutely Mona Awad-ing.

A more successful take on Mona Awad’s “protagonist tortured by her struggles and temptations trying to survive and not be led astray by the devil” than her attempt at doing this in All's Well(Mona Awad).

I was more invested in Miranda’s struggles with chronic pain in All’s Well than Mirabelle’s struggles with her appearance in Rouge because of my own struggles with chronic pain. But Mirabelle’s struggles are more topical in the world of today — where we’re obsessed with desires and expectations sold to us by the people in power to grease the wheels of capitalism at the cost of our own health and well-being.

Mona Awad’s work seems to be steeped in her own lived experience (or at least she makes it seem that way). Reading Mona Awad’s fiction feels like reading creative non-fiction which makes her inevitable swerves into magical realism that much more impactful because her stories feel so grounded in the real.

It just works for me.

Another thing I liked about Rouge was the inclusion of references to Mirabelle’s upbringing in Montreal (the city I was born in and have lived around my entire life), the depiction of her French Canadian grandmother and the presence of the French language, usually untranslated, throughout the text. Reading these parts of the novel made me feel “in the know” and smart because I happened to grow up in the same city Mona Awad did.

NB: The name Mirabelle is composed of two parts: Mira and Belle. Mira means “Look” in Spanish and Belle means “Beautiful” in French.

It’s a little on the nose all things considered but it always makes me feel smart to recognize the allusions and references being made by authors in their work (this probably explains in large part why I’m so in love with Gene Wolfe’s work).