|| Book Talk First Newsletter: Confessions Of Bookaholic ||

Ambrose Young was beautiful. He was tall and muscular, with hair that touched his shoulders and eyes that burned right through you. The kind of beautiful that graced the covers of romance novels, and Fern Taylor would know. She'd been reading them since she was thirteen. But maybe because he was so beautiful he was never someone Fern thought she could have...until he wasn't beautiful anymore.
Making Faces is the story of a small town where five young men go off to war, and only one comes back. It is the story of loss. Collective loss, individual loss, loss of beauty, loss of life, loss of identity. It is the tale of one girl's love for a broken boy, and a wounded warrior's love for an unremarkable girl. This is a story of friendship that overcomes heartache, heroism that defies the common definitions, and a modern tale of Beauty and the Beast, where we discover that there is a little beauty and a little beast in all of us.


There once was a little girl Fern, with curly red hair, freckled, who felt a little ugly, who loved reading and writing romance novels imagining her prince charming. She always dreamed of tall, dark, muscular, with long hair, confident and sport champion: she dreamed and loved Ambrose Young. She was invisible to his eyes until a fortuitous exchange of letters is a glimpse of the soul of each other but a chink too small so that can't make a difference at the time. And then comes the September 11, 2001 and America is brought to its knees by the attack on the twin towers, an event that marked the United States and beyond.

"Maybe we just don't recognize the blessings that come as a result of terrible things"

Ambrose joined the army and with him, his four friends, and here the life of the student, son, model athlete undergoes a turn that will put him to hell. When the soldier falls almost two years after the mission in Iraq in his village nothing will be as before: he was taken away his beauty, he was taken away his dignity, he has been taken away his friends ... he was taken away the peace and life!


"If God makes all our faces, did he laugh when he made me?"

But Fern continues to see in him only the man she loved in high school and that although he is scarred, he is back on his feet from the Army. His Ambrose is back and he needs her to find himself, to be able to accept what happened, to shake off the guilt that haunts him ... and Fern will be there as a gift of God ready to give all the love and attention he needs to.
Ambrose does not feel, however, the height of the love of Fern, she has become so cute no one will ever want to be with a monster like him ... it seems the roles are reversed but the same Fern still suffers from the syndrome of 'ugly' girl who always makes her feel inadequate.

"Have you been nobody?...
Everybody who is somebody becomes nobody the moment they fail."

Making faces is more than a love story - is a story that teaches us to overcome the difficulties of life with courage. In this book, every page, every line of dialogue, every word is deeply meaningful, all history is pervaded by constant references to religious and spiritual nevertheless perfectly match the development of the events without being pretentious or false moralist. This is a novel with a unique message about true beauty and on second chances, it's a heartbreaking story of intense love, friendship, heroism, of loss and knowing how to accept yourself.

A special shoutout to character of Bailey who brings together these two protagonist. He will be able, in spite of his disability, to give lessons of life to everyone and make us feel children, able to complain of anything having everything.