Do you like your face? Well, I like mine and so did Martin until he was walking home from a club with his three friends--The Group of Three. They were walking home through a bad part of west London and Martin and his friend Matt accepted a ride from two drug dealers who had been shooting up on heroine. They get in a crash and one of the dealers is killed and the other is arrested. Matt pries himself out of the car with a few broken ribs, but Martin is not so lucky. The car explodes in a big ball of fire, and Martin’s body is severely burned, but mainly it’s his face that is the problem. Martin blacks out and wakes up in the hospital a few days later. He can barely feel his face and he has troubles moving. In fact, he can barely move at all at first except for his fingers. His parents come to visit him in the hospital, and as soon as he wakes up his mom breaks down in tears and starts crying her eyes out. His dad on the other hand, who is normally very quiet, seems to be now completely lost for words, except for the occasional muttering to say he’s sorry. He sees therapists and doctors as well. A few days later his friends and girlfriend Natalie come to visit him. It’s his two best friends and his girlfriend, and Martin still describes it as one of the most awkward times he has ever had. He then gets facial reconstruction surgery, and although his face looks better, it will never look as it did before. So, after that Martin decides to go back to school for the beginning of the new term, and him and his friends drift apart, and him and Natalie just break up. He also gets in a couple fights and has a hard time adjusting to things at first. Then, at the end he realizes he can be whom he is, regardless of how he looks.

So I would say the moral of the story was a restatement of the phrase “You can’t judge a book by its cover.” Overall I would give the book four out of ten, because it just didn’t seem very realistic to me or pull me into the story. In the section of reality the names in the story just seemed fake to me, whether it was the ridiculous names of the music and the clubs and raves, or if it was just Martin, the whole thing just seemed way to sugarcoated and cheesy. I would recommend the book to a younger audience, then, because maybe it would seem more real to them than it would to some