Skin Deep

Gr 7 Up—In this story of love and recovery, two teenagers fall for each other while dealing with transience, family strife, and scars both physical and emotional. Told in alternating perspectives, the novel opens with 14-year-old Jenna about to experience the car accident that kills her best friend and gives her a disfiguring scar. Meanwhile, 16-year-old Ryan is dealing with his bipolar hippie mother as they travel around the UK on a narrow boat. Both teens have to cope with perceptions and prejudice—Jenna about her recovery from and involvement in the car crash, Ryan about his life as a non-Roma (a subset of a persecuted European minority) traveler. Their relationship develops well over time, though at some points Ryan seems a little too good to be true. However, he does make some teenage errors in judgment. When the boy who caused Jenna's car accident is found dead, Ryan is the most obvious target to blame. At times, the moral lesson—the relative unimportance of physical beauty compared with other qualities—is a bit heavy-handed, but this does not interfere too much with the reading experience, and Jenna's post-traumatic interior life is realistic and understated rather than gratuitous and exploitative.