Chloe Elizabeth Wilson
Penguin Random House
Otago Daily Times, August 2nd 2025
From Gwyneth Paltrow to Hailey Bieber, the beauty-industrial complex is full of glamorous women who promise their products will empower and heal us. But the sense of something poisonous lurks beneath the surface of their slickly-polished messages of enfranchisement and self-care. It is fertile ground for imagination that Chloe Elizabeth Wilson mines to great effect in her darkly satirical debut.
Marnie Selleck once aspired to screenwriting career, but a series of losses, culminating in her mother’s death, have plunged her into a morass of grief and self-doubt. Now, at the ripe old age of twenty-nine she is broke, directionless, and working as the receptionist at RideOn!, a boutique Melbourne cycle studio whose rich, sleekly clad clientele are a constant reminder that she herself is ‘neither ambitious not professional, and even her youth [feels] questionable.”
Having realised that RideOn! won’t fix her, she is already contemplating leaving when a client suggests she apply for a position at rytual cosmetica, the beauty industry’s hottest new luxury brands. Fascinated by rytual’s founder and CEO, Luna Peters, Marnie accepts the invitation and within days is finds herself using empathic engagement to dissuade complaining consumers from pursuing a refund, a task at which she proves surprisingly adept. But Luna, with whom she turns out to have a more than professional connection with, soon promotes her to the role of (very) personal assistant.
With the new role comes new responsibilities, and the closer she gets to rytual’s inner workings, the more uncomfortable Marnie becomes. Thecompany’s operation falls somewhere between a pyramid scheme (entry-level pay is minimal and promotion contingent on recruiting new employees) and a cult devoted to Luna’s mission to “push out masculine norms and welcome the female divine.” Mondays start with a communal Clearing, where the all-female staff share how men have wronged them during the week, while at invitation-only Friday Night Drinks, individual rytualists are invited to rebalance the score in a more tangible way. Then there are the rumours about what happens to those who dare cross the CEO…
Despite her misgivings, Marnie can’t bring herself to walk away, however. Her attraction to Luna is irresistible and the situation morally complex. Luna genuinely wants to empower women, and her products (mostly) work. Furthermore, both she and Marnie have suffered at the hands of a male predator. The question is, how far will they go to in the name of satisfaction?
Wilson beautifully captures the industry she is parodying from the grammatically idiosyncrasy of her companies’ names to their carefully curated aesthetic. Rytualists don’t wear clothes, they wear outfits; rooms are named after women ‘unfairly treated in the public eye’; the décor is a carefully curated palate of pink and red; and hidden diffusers dispense the company’s signature fragrance, rytual She, throughout. This Pinterest-perfect veneer amplifies its wrongness, adding to novel’s gothic theatricality, which becomes increasingly surreal as it progresses.
Rytual is a delightfully escapist read. If you enjoyed Mona Awad’s Rouge, I recommend adding itto your reading list.