Sara's Face

by Melvin Burgess

Overview

Fame, beauty, and face transplants

Sara wants to be famous, and when legendary rock star Jonathon Heat offers to take her under his wing and pay for her cosmetic surgery, it's like a dream come true. But beauty comes with a hidden price tag. Is Sara willing to pay?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781416974994
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers
Publication date:	06/17/2008
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	2 MB
Age Range:	14 - 18 Years

About the Author

Melvin Burgess has produced a body of work that is both
challenging and thrilling, including the seminal teen drug and love
novels Smack and Doing It. His books have been adapted
for film, stage, and television.

Editorial Reviews

If you want to be a work of art, you have to suffer a bit," says 17-year-old Sara Carter. Sara suffers more than a bit in Burgess's (Smack; Doing It) terrifying thriller/morality play, in which she gets the spotlight. Obsessed with both stardom and physical perfection, Sara is also accident-prone, and a face-down encounter with a hot iron seems to put a permanent red mark on her quest for fame. Enter Jonathon Heat, billionaire pop star who endlessly reinvents himself, with the help of controversial plastic surgeon Dr. Kaye. Burgess draws a chilling parallel between over-the-hill icon Jonathon Heat and Michael Jackson, in Heat's attempts to look young, and in setting up a bedroom for Sara on his posh, sprawling estate. Heat shows Sara his face (which he hides under a mask), reduced to shreds after so much surgery. Bernadette, a savvy and kind nurse, and Sara's boyfriend, Mark, provide intermittent reality checks for the outlandish situation. Sara soon begins to see apparitions of a girl with no face, and Sara and Mark discover a locked room giving off the smell of rotting meat. Burgess tells the story through the narrative of a novelist-turned-investigative journalist, alternating with transcripts of Sara's video diaries (in one spine-tingling scene, she corners the "ghost," with echoes of The Blair Witch Project). Burgess wraps his message about vanity and celebrity-obsessed culture in a nightmarish, unforgettable story. Ages 12-up. (May) Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Gr 9 Up
Seventeen-year-old Sara wants to be spectacular. Not just pretty, not just popular, but spectacularly famous. She is a borderline anorexic, purposely hurts herself, often adopts different personalities, emits her own special perfume smell, and sees ghosts, among other things. When pop idol Jonathon Heat takes her under his wing, she crosses into a world of lunacy and cosmetic surgery to reach her goals. An eerie Michael Jackson-esque figure, Heat lives on a wacky estate with a private plastic surgery theater and has undergone so many facial reconstructions that he's forced to cover his pieced-together face with a mask. After Sara moves into his compound, readers are led to believe that she will meet the same fate, or worse. Known for edgy, raw teen novels that pull no punches, Burgess certainly delivers his trademark sexual frankness, folding in the issues of body image, self-mutilation, and personality disorder. Unfortunately, he chooses to use a narrator, an investigative reporter of sorts, who attempts to piece together Sara's story through a series of interviews and video diaries. A unique concept in itself, the result is a clunky story, rife with clichés and indistinct character voices. Readers will undoubtedly find themselves wishing for a twist or a turn rather than a string of obvious allusions. This modern horror story touches on many contemporary issues and could spark discussion, but the unknowable protagonist and scattered storytelling ultimately serve to distance readers rather than engage them.
—Jill Heritage MazaCopyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

A fictional "novelist doing a journalist's job" maintains stunning suspense as he conducts interviews with the secondary players in a world-famous gruesome crime. The three main players are unavailable. Seventeen-year-old Sara disappeared after the crime, perhaps dead, perhaps irreparably damaged or deranged. Dr. Kaye, an experimental surgeon who pioneered unsafe facial transplants, died in a fire. Jonathon Heat, aging rock star who had so many facial reconstructions that his grisly visage is more bone and blood than flesh, sits in jail. Interspersing Sara's spare video diary with peripheral interviews, the narrator rivets readers as a terrifying inevitability unfolds. Sara lives in Heat's mansion pursuing her "hopes and dreams" about amorphous, wild fame, dissembling left and right. She tells one story to boyfriend Mark, one to nurse Bernadette and another to Kaye and Heat. How far will she go to achieve fame and escape the psychotic inner demons saying her face is not her own? A gory nail-biter with ghastly sadness and maddening emotional incomprehensibility, exquisitely done. Read in daylight. (Fiction. YA)

Kirkus Reviews

"Vanity and celebrity-obsessed culture in a nightmarish, unforgettable story." — Publishers Weekly, starred review

From the Publisher