Aesthetica
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2.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In a debut novel as radiant as it is caustic, a former influencer confronts her past—and takes inventory of the damages that underpin the surface-glamour of social media.
At 19, she was an Instagram celebrity. Now, at 35, she works behind the cosmetic counter at the “black and white store,” peddling anti-aging products to women seeking physical and spiritual transformation. She too is seeking rebirth. She’s about to undergo the high-risk, elective surgery Aesthetica™, a procedure that will reverse all her past plastic surgery procedures, returning her, she hopes, to a truer self. Provided she survives the knife.
But on the eve of the surgery, her traumatic past resurfaces when she is asked to participate in the public takedown of her former manager/boyfriend, who has rebranded himself as a paragon of “woke” masculinity in the post-#MeToo world. With the hours ticking down to her surgery, she must confront the ugly truth about her experiences on and off the Instagram grid.
Propulsive, dark, and moving, Aesthetica is a Veronica for the age of “Instagram face,” delivering a fresh, nuanced examination of feminism, #MeToo, and mother-daughter relationships, all while confronting our collective addiction to followers, filters, and faux realities.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rowbottom (Jell-O Girls) delivers a complex and deeply engaging portrayal of a woman looking back on her career as an Instagram model. The narrative fluidly alternates between the near future, when Anna is in her mid-30s, and her rise to influencer status in 2017 at 19. After moving from Houston to Hollywood straight out of high school, she's quickly scouted by a seedy but famed manager, Jake Alton. Jake and Anna soon begin a sexual relationship that, while consensual, is centered on an uneven power dynamic; he also gives her drugs and talks her into breast implants. At 35, a much-transformed Anna has returned to Hollywood not for a comeback but an undoing. Alone in a hotel room, she drinks wine and pops pills the night before a risky facial procedure called aesthetica, which involves the reversal of her implants and rhinoplasties. "The in-between time," Anna narrates, "before results are final, is my favorite of any procedure... my body working to heal, my brain acclimating to the bruises and swelling until one day they're gone and the transformation is complete." Rowbottom brings as much tension to the story of Jake's manipulation in Anna's past as she does to the aesthetica, which Anna knows she might not survive. The subplots are equally rewarding, among them Anna's inability to save her troubled single mother, and the reappearance of Anna's childhood best friend, a successful runner who is struggling with anorexia. It all builds to a scorching commentary on society's blindness toward female pain. Fans of Mary Gaitskill's work and Black Mirror will flock to this pitch-perfect novel.
