kubleeka reviewed Youthjuice by E. K. Sathue
When you write a novel and forget to put in the plot, characters, and message
2 stars
Youthjuice is a book that, by the cover and summary, promises a scathing, body-horror-fueled takedown of the beauty industry. It not only fails to deliver this, it fails to deliver much of anything at all.
My one positive point, and the reason for two stars instead of one: the sentence-level writing is interesting and very stylized, full of metaphors and minute details, something which bodes well for body horror. But unless you're squicked by fingernail injuries, the body horror just kind of...never arrives. Sophia, the protagonist, gnaws obsessively on her nails and cuticles throughout the book, and we have one scene with evidence of severe skin damage toward the end, and that's the extent of it.
Now, absence of body horror does not make a book bad, and I would be willing to chalk this up to my misinterpreting the back cover if Youthjuice had anything else going …
Youthjuice is a book that, by the cover and summary, promises a scathing, body-horror-fueled takedown of the beauty industry. It not only fails to deliver this, it fails to deliver much of anything at all.
My one positive point, and the reason for two stars instead of one: the sentence-level writing is interesting and very stylized, full of metaphors and minute details, something which bodes well for body horror. But unless you're squicked by fingernail injuries, the body horror just kind of...never arrives. Sophia, the protagonist, gnaws obsessively on her nails and cuticles throughout the book, and we have one scene with evidence of severe skin damage toward the end, and that's the extent of it.
Now, absence of body horror does not make a book bad, and I would be willing to chalk this up to my misinterpreting the back cover if Youthjuice had anything else going for it. But it delivers completely flat characters with roughly one trait apiece (being the protagonist, Sophia gets two traits: her obsession with beauty and the cause of her nail-biting, but the latter is not revealed until the end), and a plot consisting of a meandering sequence of events with no identifiable stakes, climax, or major conflict. Sophia floats through the story without agency or motives, and not even murdering her best friend changes this. Three-quarters of the way through this book, I couldn't have said what an 'end' to this story might look like.
In the end, Sophia rides off happily into the sunset, having escaped the consequences of her actions by sheer luck even as those same actions ruin other characters. The moral is that beauty products should be properly safety-tested before going to market. The book is steeped in modern beauty culture, but never questions or criticizes it, only uses it as a setting. If you saw this book in the store and thought a criticism of modern beauty standards sounded interesting, put it back and go watch The Substance instead.