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Synopsis:
A 29-year-old copywriter realizes that beauty is possible—at a terrible cost—in this surreal, satirical send-up of NYC It-girl culture.
From Sophia Bannion’s first day on the Storytelling team at HEBE (hee-bee), a luxury skincare/wellness company based in New York’s trendy SoHo neighborhood and named after the Greek goddess of youth, it’s clear something is deeply amiss. But Sophia, pushing thirty, has plenty of skeletons in her closet next to the designer knockoffs and doesn’t care. Though she leads an outwardly charmed life, she aches for a deeper meaning to her flat existence—and a cure for her brutal nail-biting habit. She finds it all and more at HEBE, and with Tree Whitestone, HEBE’s charismatic founder and CEO.
Soon, Sophia is addicted to her HEBE lifestyle—especially youthjuice, the fatty, soothing moisturizer Tree has asked Sophia to test. But when cracks in HEBE’s infrastructure start to worsen—and Sophia learns the gruesome secret ingredient at the heart of youthjuice—she has to decide how far she’s willing to go to stay beautiful forever.
Glittering with ominous flashes of Sophia’s coming-of-rage story, former beauty editor E.K. Sathue’s horror debut is as incisive as it is stomach-churning in its portrayal of all-consuming female friendship and the beauty industry’s short attention span. youthjuice does to skincare influencers what Bret Easton Ellis did to yuppies. You’ll never moisturize the same way again.
Review:
Nothing is as it seems in E.K. Sathue’s novel, youthjuice. Sophia lands a job at a high end makeup company, HEBE as one of their “storytellers”. They are testing a new anti-aging cream they call “youthjuice” on the inner circle of the company, and the cream has dramatic effects. The origins of the cream and the lifestyle captures Sophia becomes a catalyst for her alienating her friends and boyfriend while digging deeper and deeper into the work of HEBE.
The overall concepts of the novel are interesting. I do like stories about people put into situations and environments that they are ill equipped to handle so they either change the culture or adapt. Sophia is not ready for HEBE when she first arrived and does not know what they are doing to reinvent makeup. She just looks up to Tree Whitestone, the CEO, and will do what it takes to find her footing while trying to balance her old life with her new. These ideas are there, but they are not solid. The storytelling is soft and does not do the job in the way that it wants to. The characters are underdeveloped, and I don’t feel like this will be a novel that I remember a few days from now. Sophia’s journey through destroying every relationship she has is fairly mundane, the only one that really sticks out is the falling out between her and her roommate Dom, whom we only know as someone she is close to and shares clothes with. The one relationship that Sathue spends a great deal of the novel exploring is flashbacks from when Sophia was in high school and had a friend named Mona. The finale of that friendship is so generic and boring that any reader will guess the end within the first few pages. Sophia is supposed to be written as someone who is cold and disinterested in other people, but the truth is she comes off as self-centered, bitchy, and a person nobody would want to be around in the first place. For her to get deep into the inner circle of HEBE is unexplained and unexplainable. Maybe it is because she is just as much of a fraud as everyone else in the novel.
There is a great amount of potential in youthjuice. I like the ideas of the story, but I do not like the execution. The novel feels like it could use some more focus and editing. At 288 pages, it seems like it is still at least fifty pages too long.
I received this as an ARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
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