{"id":2283,"date":"2025-09-29T15:09:40","date_gmt":"2025-09-29T02:09:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/?p=2283"},"modified":"2025-09-29T15:09:40","modified_gmt":"2025-09-29T02:09:40","slug":"rytual","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/2025\/09\/29\/rytual\/","title":{"rendered":"Rytual"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Chloe Elizabeth Wilson<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Penguin Random House<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Otago Daily Times, August 2nd 2025<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marnie Selleck once aspired to screenwriting career, but a series of losses, culminating in her mother\u2019s 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 \u2018neither ambitious not professional, and even her youth [feels] questionable.\u201d  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Having realised that RideOn! won\u2019t fix her, she is already contemplating leaving when a client suggests she apply for a position at rytual cosmetica, the beauty industry\u2019s hottest new luxury brands. Fascinated by rytual\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the new role comes new responsibilities, and the closer she gets to rytual\u2019<\/em>s inner workings, the more uncomfortable Marnie becomes. Thecompany\u2019s 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\u2019s mission to \u201cpush out masculine norms and welcome the female divine.\u201d 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 <\/em>way. Then there are the rumours about what happens to those who dare cross the CEO\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite her misgivings, Marnie can\u2019t 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wilson beautifully captures the industry she is parodying from the grammatically idiosyncrasy of her companies\u2019 names to their carefully curated aesthetic. Rytualists don\u2019t wear clothes, they wear outfits<\/em>; rooms are named after women \u2018unfairly treated in the public eye\u2019; the d\u00e9cor is a carefully curated palate of pink and red; and hidden diffusers dispense the company\u2019s signature fragrance, rytual She, <\/em>throughout. This Pinterest-perfect veneer amplifies its wrongness, adding to novel\u2019s gothic theatricality, which becomes increasingly surreal as it progresses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rytual<\/em> is a delightfully escapist read. If you enjoyed Mona Awad\u2019s Rouge<\/em>, I recommend adding itto your reading list.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[498,512,370,18],"class_list":["post-2283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-498","tag-chloe-elizabeth-wilson","tag-fiction","tag-odt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2283"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2283\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2284,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2283\/revisions\/2284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}