SARA’S FACE

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)