Meg Cabot - Giving Back: Or, You’re Probably Fine

Meg Cabot - Giving Back: Or, You’re Probably Fine

A gracefully written account of one woman's physical and spiritual struggle to surmount childhood cancer, permanent disfigurement, and, ultimately, ""the deep bottomless grief...called ugliness."" After surviving relentless medical horrors -- the removal at age nine of half her jaw due to Ewing Sarcoma, two and a half years of chemotherapy, and two years of reconstructive surgery -- Grealy's true battle begins when she looks in the mirror and finds herself trapped behind a face, in a ""self"" that she hates, and for which her peers cruelly punish her. Grealy endured insults and ostracism as a teenager in Spring Valley, N.Y. At Sarah Lawrence College in the mid-1980s, she discovered poetry as a vehicle for her pent-up emotions. During graduate school at the University of Iowa, she had a series of unsatisfying sexual affairs, hoping to prove she was lovable. No longer eligible for medical coverage, she moved to London to take advantage of Britain's socialized medicine, and underwent a 13-hour operation in Scotland. She finds solace and inspiration in the company of horses and other animals, and as a young adult, she cultivates an enriching inner life through reading, and later writing. Grealy now lives in New York City. Her discovery that true beauty lies within makes this a wise and healing book. http://bookstorecommunity.com/autobiography-of-a-face/

The Reader

Michael Berg, 15, is on his way home from high school in post-World War II Germany when he becomes ill and is befriended by a woman who takes him home. When he recovers from hepatitis many weeks later, he dutifully takes the 40-year-old Hanna flowers in appreciation, and the two become lovers. The relationship, at first purely physical, deepens when Hanna takes an interest in the young man's education, insisting that he study hard and attend classes. Soon, meetings take on a more meaningful routine in which after lovemaking Michael reads aloud from the German classics. There are hints of Hanna's darker side: one inexplicable moment of violence over a minor misunderstanding, and the fact that the boy knows nothing of her life other than that she collects tickets on the streetcar. Content with their arrangement, Michael is only too willing to overlook Hanna's secrets. She leaves the city abruptly and mysteriously, and he does not see her again until, as a law student, he sits in on her case when she is being tried as a Nazi criminal. [...] The theme of good versus evil and the question of moral responsibility are eloquently presented in this spare coming-of-age story. http://bookstorecommunity.com/2010/the-reader/