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[REVIEW] “The Body Remade: On Sarah Wang’s New Skin” by Kailee Haong Ellis

Sarah Wang. New Skin, Little, Brown and Company, 2026. 448 pgs.

“Body horror” receives a new definition in Sarah Wang’s debut novel, New Skin. For centuries, body horror has been explored as a theme in literature. Tales such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, depicting a literal patchwork, human-esque monster, might come to mind. Mangled, garbled skin, blood, and gore: these are some of the tell-tale facets of body horror. In New Skin, Wang brings the typically science-fiction and horror elements of body horror into literary fiction, but not in the ways you might expect.

The novel opens in a hospital waiting room, sterile and cloying. Linli and her mother, Fanny Feng, wait until they are called. Fanny is immediately described as hiding something from her daughter. Linli observes:

As my mother stood up, all eyes in the room turned to look at her face, swathed from chin to hairline and ear to ear in clumsy gauze. She hadn’t wanted me to see her face yet, insisting on bandaging it alone this morning. The effect was lumpy, lopsided, mimicking the terrain I imagined lay below. (p. 3)

Several pages later, when the gauze is removed to reveal her mother’s face, Linli continues:

It was worse than I’d imagined. The tip of her nose was purple. It twisted inward as if it were trying to smell itself. A black scab the size of a silver dollar crept from the left side of her nose onto her cheek… her face was bloated, pulled, stretched: the surface was proofed dough that had been punched down and was beginning to rise again. (p. 5)

While Fanny’s deformed face opens the novel and begins to explain its title, the novel encompasses far more than her never-ending series of botched surgeries and experimental procedures. Wang offers a deep dive into Fanny and Linli’s extremely strained relationship. Fanny is portrayed as abrasive, cold, and borderline abusive towards Linli, while Linli comes across as a young woman who has spent most of her life trying to escape those very qualities in her mother, only to be inevitably drawn back by her magnetism.

There is a parallel between Fanny’s surgeries and her relationship with her daughter. She has spent decades and endless amounts of money trying to make herself perfect, only to render herself more frightening and unrecognisable to everyone, but especially to Linli. Internally, too, Fanny’s brief attempts to connect with Linli are often destroyed by a single moment in which she says or does something that pushes her daughter further away.

It is after living with her mother again, following years apart, that Linli begins to wonder about who Fanny really is. Wang allows Linli a moment of deep introspection as she thinks:

There were so many things I wished I knew. When she believed, what did she believe in? Before America, before all this. (p. 43)

Much like the face of the mother she once knew and loved, now buried beneath dozens of treatments, Fanny’s past remains well out of reach for Linli. Any moment in which we begin to see Linli develop compassion or empathy for Fanny is often quashed when Fanny pulls her next trick. This time, illegal injections of non-medical substances threaten Fanny’s life, causing Linli to make the ultimate sacrifice: abandoning her dreams of graduate school and moving to New York to ensure her mother’s safety.

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Wang offers a fresh and nuanced examination of beauty standards.

The plot has moments when it begins to plateau under the predictability of Fanny’s destructive actions and their consequences. It seems there is no world in which Fanny can turn her life around, nor one in which the two of them can live harmoniously. Things take a turn when Linli discovers that Fanny has been chosen to participate in a reality-television competition called America’s Beauty Extreme, featuring contestants from all walks of life who have, at some point, undergone a botched procedure, or several, in Fanny’s case. For Linli, the biggest issue is not Fanny’s presence on the show, but rather the fact that she is also part of an ongoing criminal investigation into illegal surgical practices. By placing Fanny in such a precarious situation, Wang offers a fresh and nuanced examination of beauty standards, the extremes to which people are willing to go, and the influence of cosmetic procedures and plastic surgery on a population with which they are not always associated: non-affluent immigrant women.

Wang’s development of both Linli and Fanny is admirable. In Linli’s case, as the novel’s first-person narrator, we are given access to the full extent of her interiority. Her frustration at her inability to follow through with her life plans, coupled with her guilt and compassion towards a mother who has not always been kind to her, makes her a complicated and multidimensional character. Although we do not have the same first-person access to Fanny’s thoughts, Wang is still able to delve into her psyche and show readers how truly complex, and even lovable, a person and mother she is through her dialogue and, ultimately, her actions. Both characters wear their flaws on their sleeves while harbouring much gentler interior lives.

The pivotal moment of the novel forces Fanny to choose between the two things she cares most about in the world: plastic surgery and her only daughter. While that might seem a simple decision for most, Fanny’s complexities, personal history of trauma, upbringing, and unpredictability leave the reader questioning whether she will achieve a redemption arc. Linli, too, has choices to make. Will she continue to harbour resentment towards her mother and the inherited, intergenerational trauma she carries with her around the world? Will she stand up for herself and choose herself? In the novel’s final pages, Linli asks her mother: “Why can’t I ever just have what I want?” (p. 295).

With the increasing prevalence and accessibility of cosmetic, at-home, and surgical procedures, New Skin is a riveting and relevant novel that addresses a host of issues constantly before us through a fresh and compelling storyline: racism, immigration, unattainable beauty standards, the falsities of reality television, and familial strife. Wang threads these contemporary realities into a tapestry that one must stand back from to take in fully. New Skin tackles modernity and the present day without becoming too heavy-handed. It reads partly as a contemporary family drama and partly as a cautionary tale.

^{How to cite, Ellis, Kailee Haong. “The Body Remade: On Sarah Wang’s New Skin.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 18 Aug. 2026. chajournal.com/2026/08/18/skin.}

Kailee Haong Ellis is a queer Khmer-Chinese-American writer and editor. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University. Her work has appeared in Split Lip, Moss, The Inlander, and elsewhere. She lives and writes in Seattle. Learn more at kaileehaong.com.