Making Faces Review

I can’t remember why I decided to preorder this book, but I did (I definitely like supporting authors and preordering as many books as tempt me and can be afforded), and trust me, past me who preordered gets all the kudos from present me.

Making Faces by Amy Harmon

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 little beauty and a little beast in all of us.

Rating:

I started this book not expecting too much, for some reason I thought it was set in WWII times (don’t ask me why, well, somehow I put it close to the WWII books so yeah, past me had her moments). Thinking it wouldn’t hook me too much, I started as I went to bed.

Oh boy! I stayed up until 2 am just to finish it. I seriously could not put it down, my boyfriend came to bed and I barely acknowledged him, this had to be read. I needed to know what was going to happen.

There were a couple of interesting things in the book beyond the “B&B” retelling. It spoke of feeling ugly/not interesting/attractive and never really realising you’ve grown out of it, not in a crazy ugly duckling to swan but more of a “people will like you and some won’t, but it’s okay”. Then it also has a character that is in a wheelchair and that is amazing to read and I was so invested in the character. Family isn’t totally absent in this book, which was refreshing. Parents and family exist and aren’t there just to drive the plot. It also touches on guilt, beliefs, and a lot of things that I was not expecting here.

I thought this was a historic romance kinda book, and it was so much more than that.

Moon recommends

If you’re feeling up to preorders and love Beauty and the Beast, try A Curse So Dark and Lonely. Obviously Making Faces has to be recommmended. One of my other favourite B&B retellings is Hunted and Beauty.