Book Review: Making Faces by Amy Harmon

Making Faces by Amy Harmon

Making Faces
by Amy Harmon
Book description from Goodreads:

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.

Goodreads Link

My review:

***5 STARS***

I cannot describe how amazing this book is. It's just . . . wow. Absolutely breathtaking. It's heart warming, the kind of story you get from reading Anne of Green Gables or Heidi (I'm a sucker for Classics).

When I was reading this, I was thrown back into the French movie I saw many years ago: Cyrano de Bergerac. Cyrano is a man with a huge nose so he is deemed ugly by many but he is a genius in poetry and words. To help his friend to capture the heart of a beautiful maiden, he writes beautiful love letters and pretend it's from his friend. And thus, the love affair of letters begins between the maiden and the ugly guy pretending to be his friend. Cyrano is afraid to reveal himself to her, that he is unworthy for her love because of his ugliness. But his heart is of gold that eventually, the lady falls for him.

This book takes a similar stance. Fern, to help her beautiful friend to capture the eye of a handsome male, she writes beautiful letters to him and signed under her friend, Rita. Of course, the ruse is found out eventually. What I really loved about this book is that it focuses on the beauty of the heart rather than physical appearance. It's such a refreshing read especially after many books nowadays all talk about heroines falling for good-looking men. It's kinda sad really. This book is beyond that. It shows true love can oversee past the ugliness of one's appearance and fall in love with their souls.

And I like that. Because beauty of appearance does not last. It's the inside that counts. What you are made of.

This book speaks of the truth. It doesn't paint fake colours. It's real. And it's a gift for the soul.