Ravishing

An unsettling, wildly compulsive debut, Ravishing shines a light on the dark enticements of the beauty industry and how it reduces us to the worst parts of ourselves in search of the right kind of beautiful

Like every American teenager, Kashmira wants nothing more than to be wanted. What’s worse, every time she looks in the mirror, she sees the features of the father who abandoned her family, and the grief is reopened. But when an old friend introduces her to the wonders of Evolvoir, a personalized beauty product that mimics social media filters, layering a “second face” over your real one, Kashmira jumps at the chance to have features that are exactly what is in vogue. 

At Evolvoir’s corporate offices in New York, Kashmira’s twenty-something brother Nikhil begins what he’s sure is another cookie-cutter start-up job. Already disillusioned with the tech world, Nikhil’s instinct is to rebel against his new employer’s colonialist beauty standards and create radical change from the inside. He wants to work somewhere that values faces like his—like his mother’s, like his sister’s—even if he must take matters into his own hands to do so.

But as Nikhil’s efforts successfully expand Evolvoir’s customer base, reports of medical distress in some of the product’s users begin to surface. And when Kashmira is hospitalized, undiagnosable inflammation consuming her body, Nikhil uncovers the vicious truth about Evolvoir’s proprietary technology and must decide where his loyalty lies. 

Both suspenseful and full of heart Ravishing is Gold Diggers meets Uncanny Valley, with a touch of The Other Black Girl. Through Kashmira and Nikhil’s stories, debut novelist Eshani Surya deftly excavates the experience of coming of age in white spaces. And with its unflinching look at living with chronic illness, Ravishing asks how much quiet suffering we’ll endure in exchange for beauty, for acceptance, for love.  View Less