youthjuice
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3.8 • 8 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
American Psycho meets The Devil Wears Prada: outrageous body horror for the goop generation
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
If The Picture of Dorian Gray were set at a contemporary Goop-esque "wellness and lifestyle" brand, it might read something like Sathue's satirical, gory, and delectable debut. Sophia Bannion, 29, is the newest creative hire at Manhattan's Hebe, a beauty and wellness company run by the freakishly beautiful Tree Whitestone and named for the Greek goddess of youth. From the jump, Sathue makes readers aware that something sinister is behind the façade of perfection at Hebe, and as Sophia becomes more enmeshed in Tree's inner circle, that something slowly comes into focus. In this horror story examining the social pressures on girls and women, the only fault is how on-the-nose some of the symbolism is ("We bathed in their blood to stay young" goes the opening line). Nonetheless, as Sophia's past comes to light and Hebe's dark side is revealed, readers will be on the edges of their seats waiting to find out the truth. It's a certifiable page-turner.
