"Evolve Yourself, Embrace Yourself." So encourages Evolvoir, the fictional technology company disrupting the beauty industry in Eshani Surya's Ravishing. Evolvoir promises a face cream that delivers everything from minor facial tweaks to complete appearance overhauls, and teenager Kashmira is ripe for such messaging. She's spent her entire life attempting to conform to her father's wishes, only for him to walk out on their family for good, leaving her estranged from her older brother and living with her emotionally absent mother. She wants nothing more than to "separate herself from her dysfunctional specter of a family," but she sees her father's face every time she looks in the mirror, complete with his intensely internalized racism against his South Asian heritage and a "deep-seated hatred of what he called 'traditional shit.' " Lonely, friendless, and steeped in online rhetoric and harmful beauty standards, Kashmira starts using Evolvoir's signature product. But although the product works on her face, it comes at a cost--one she's not sure she's willing to pay.
Surya's debut novel infuses an emotional family drama with the political intrigue surrounding Big Tech to great effect. Though some themes--structural inequities that bar people of color from accessing mental health resources, self-acceptance as the greatest gift, the risks of consumerism in place of actual healing, to name but a few--are planted a bit obviously within the larger plot, they never feel entirely out of place. As the wellness industry grows ever larger, Ravishing is a timely exploration of what it truly means to be well, and what happens when wellness becomes, in and of itself, a kind of illness. --Kerry McHugh, freelance writer