by Natasha Friend
Publication: June 28th 2012
Viking Juvenile
What if you lost the thing that made you who you are?
Lexi has always been stunning. Her butter-colored hair and perfect features have helped her attract friends, a boyfriend, and the attention of a modeling scout. But everything changes the night Lexi's face goes through a windshield. Now she's not sure what's worse: the scars she'll have to live with forever, or what she saw going on between her best friend and her boyfriend right before the accident. With the help of her trombone-playing, defiantly uncool older sister and a guy at school recovering from his own recent trauma, Lexi learns she's much more than just a pretty face.
Thank god for the ending or else this book probably would probably have 1 star.
It's just hard to like a book when you hate the narrator to the point where you want to leave right in the middle of the story. I get it. I get that for most of your life you were known as the pretty one and recieved so many comments about how gorgeous your face was. It can be so upsetting to lose something that's a such a huge part of your life. I get that.
I just felt like I couldn't connect with Lexi. I sympathized for her in the first 100 pages because I just felt bad for her. Here was a girl who lost her friendship with her best friend, her boyfriend, and the thing that defined her. She deserved to be miserable and to hate life, but do you really have to drag it out for two months after the accident?
I feel like every conversation Lexi had with everyone was BOOHOO MY FACE MY LIFE IS OVER MY FACE MY PRECIOUS FACE. But at some point, you have to move on from what happened. Luckily, Lexi did move on. But it took her a long time and a lot of pushing from others.
Taylor seemed realistic, yet not. The feelings Taylor had were reasonable, but the reason behind Taylor and Lexi's feud was just...annoying. And there was Heidi, the girl that no one likes but they let her hang around. But the relationship between Lexi and Heidi towards the end of the book confused me. There was unresolved anger on Lexi's side of things.
I wanted this book to be able to teach girls that beauty isn't everything. That if something happens to you, you can move on someday and be happy with your new life. If you don't like something, find new pieces to fill in the blanks. But in my opinion, this book didn't really teach that at all. Most of the time, it just felt like Lexi was just being overdramatic and wanted everyone to join her pity party, overlooking all the other people in her life.
The ending made me happy, but it wasn't enough to make this book spectatcular. The introduction of Theo was cute, and their relationship was cute, but all the in between-ness was messy and I didn't really get a sense of Theo.
I feel like a lot of this book had messyness between Lexi and -insert name here-. I'm usually a fan of Ms. Friend's work, but this book just didn't work for me.
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