"The Goddess Effect" Review
On white women wellness and body horror
I relate deeply to being the only woman of color at a trendy workout studio. Stepping into a white space veiled in Lululemon and tiny lockers is a canon event for brown girls on a wellness journey.
Anita is a 30-something-year-old Indian girl who is hell-bent on running away from herself. Leaving her digital journalism job behind in NYC and grappling with her father’s death, she gets on a one-way flight to Los Angeles where she’ll live with a bunch of strangers in a Real World-style set up called ‘The Gig’; think Soho House meets Airbnb. Everyone at the Gig is either a tech startup bro or a crystal-carrying yogi. The residents at the Gig keep the place clean and ensure the Nespresso machine is always stocked in exchange for free rent.
Anita stumbles upon The Goddess Effect, a workout studio with a sinister secret. Venus, the studio’s founder who constantly speaks in euphemisms, left the corporate world behind to create the next big thing in boutique fitness. As the story moves along, Anita unlocks a web of secrets and characters. The book tackles classism, racism, and grief with LA as its backdrop.
Now onto the review; I wasn’t in love with the writing in the first quarter of the book. Firstly, I found it to be a little amateur. Anita is obviously a millennial and her inner monologues often read as Instagram captions both literally and linguistically. Secondly, Anita is struggling with her identity. Her rocky relationship with her Indian background haunts her in everything she does from the dismissive way she speaks to her mother to her desire to be a rich skinny white woman. As a black woman myself who has found herself to be the only WOC in white spaces many times throughout my life, I sympathized with Anita. But at 30-something years old, I felt like she should have been long past that phase.
The Goddess Effect has a body horror element which I won’t get into because I’ll pretty much spoil the book. I was disappointed in the pacing. Much of the action and the unraveling of Venus’ disturbing second identity is jam-packed in the last handful of chapters. It felt super rushed which was disappointing because I had really just started to enjoy the book. You know when you watch a movie and it drags during the first 85% and then all of a sudden you’re jolted out of your haze during the last few scenes? This was that in book form.
My final rating for The Goddess Effect is a 3.5. Anita has beautiful character development and the body horror aspect was a cool element, but the pacing knocked the rating down for me. This book did inspire me to dive deeper into the women-led body horror genre. All in all, I’d recommend this as an entertaining read to pad your reading goal.