China Book Club: 'Natural Beauty' by Ling Ling Huang

This satirical horror novel explores the intersection of beauty and wellness standards with social issues like classism, racism, and sexism. The protagonist is a Chinese-American former piano prodigy who, needing to pay for her badly injured parents' care, takes a job at a beauty startup and has increasingly has to conform to the ugly side of the industry.

The New York Times described it as "a meditation on vanity, the ways in which the pursuit of physical beauty can betray the other sources of beauty in one's life,"