Book Review - Beauty by Raphael Selbourne

Selbourne's debut novel Beauty got me into a 'love-hate relationship' with it.

Simply put, I hate how ignorant, stupid, simple, racist and judgmental the title character is.
Consider this:

She thought old people were in the hospice homes because they never married and is therefore childless. She positively had conniptions when she found out some of the old women had children by different men and never married a single of them or that their children had put them there 'cause they wouldn't look after them.

She thought all white people lived in a shithole rack of a house filled with dog wastes.

She looks down on black people like their some kind of mold off a badly kept aquarium tank.

She refers to all free-thinking women as prostitutes and Hindus. What do you expect from a patriarchal brainwashed Muslim girl? Maybe because I am an enlightened West Asian female, seeing women like Beauty still stuck in their Middle - East savagery irks me.

All men are pervs. In a small way this is true but I hate how she behaves as if they're gonna rape her every chance they get. Some of them certainly have that intention, but come on - the whole time I wanted to slap her into another nationality - "get a grip, you little bitch". The sad thing is people like Beauty really do exist.

I love how he accurately captured the lives of the majority of West Asian women still in the clutches of their families.

Picture this - rape from male relatives, early marriages to abusive husband and in-laws, emotional and physical abuse from family, dehumanized to a point that you believe you're nothing but a puppet to be controlled at will by others. Most West Asian females are raised to believe this : you're nothing but a vessel for the highest bidder. As a West Asian female myself, I know this way too well.
Any hint of free thinking is not dealt with kindly. We are given hell to deal with.
The families sometimes preplan, not educating/schooling the girl so she stays dumb and ignorant, obliterating any potential for intelligent thought and autonomy. Beauty is shown to be somewhat an illiterate.

The truth is, the story of Beauty is relatable to many women, Asian or otherwise. You see a human in their rawest form, the most human they can ever be - a good balance between yin and yang. The characters are incredibly flawed but their strengths shone as well amidst their crassness.

A good read.