Faceless by Alyssa Sheinmel

High School

When Maisie get into a terrible accident, her face is partially destroyed. She’s lucky enough to qualify for a rare medical treatment: a face transplant. But how do you live your life when you can’t even recognize yourself anyone? She was a runner, a girlfriend, a good student…a normal girl. Now all that has changed.

The medical procedure of getting a face transplant, at first, seemed like a fascinating process. I was interested on how it would work. But then I read just how damaged Maisie’s face was. Her face was burned by an electrical fire, which is much hotter than a regular fire. Where her nose, cheeks and chin used to be was just gone. The skin, the muscle, the bone, everything. I know I’m giving a lot away but I trying to make a point. The way the transplant goes, in simplified terms, someone else’s face is going to replace the parts she’s now missing. She’s going to be wearing someone else’s nose. This whole procedure sounds like something from a science fiction movie or from Frankenstein. The image of someone stitching the skin together with thick black thread keep popping into my mind for some reason.

I did a bit of research on face transplants (and by that I mean I Goggled it), but after seeing a few of the pictures I decided not too. The pictures weren’t that bad it’s just the whole procedure is just too much for me. I can handle it when it’s happening on a TV show or in a book because I know it’s just special effects. But when you’re reading about an actually person, it’s just too real.

I felt really bad for this girl. She had a perfectly normal life and it was just torn away from her. These are the saddest kinds of stories to me, when the person is just minding their own business and their life changes in the blink of an eye. Maisie handles her situation pretty well in my opinion and everyone else around her handles it the way you’d expect them to. Her parents are trying to be supportive, her doctors are trying to keep her healthy, and her boyfriend has no idea what to do. I kept waiting for someone to just tell her the truth. That her life was never going to be the same and that it was going to stink for a while but hopefully everything was going to be a new kind of okay and that she just had to wait.

It’s said that this book is ‘Wonder’ for a YA (Young Adult) audience but Auggie and Maisie are completely different. Auggie was born with his extraordinary face and has lived with it his whole life. Maisie, on the other hand, had her face destroyed and then replaced at the age of 16. She had her whole life figured out and then she had to start from scratch. I’ve read a lot of books about kids and teenagers going through some pretty tough situations but this one might be the most horrifying.

This is a sad and very heavy on the heart book but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read it, it all turns out ok in the end.