We Were Beautiful

Gr 9 Up—This is a quirky novel about a teenage girl who in the aftermath of a tragedy faces grief, isolation, and harmful beauty standards. After an accident that results in the death of her sister and leaves her with physical and psychological scars, Mia Hopkins is left drowning in complicated emotions with no aid in sight. Her mother has abandoned her, her father can barely look at her, and she is shipped off to stay with her formidable grandmother in New York City, where Mia finds herself adopted into a group of young misfits. Through the acceptance of her peers, she begins to break free of her self-imposed purgatory, work through her own grief, and accept the faults of the adults around her, realizing that nobody's perfect, especially when it comes to handling death. This plot-driven story gracefully and wittily approaches the subject of grief through a first-person narrative. After she is disfigured in the accident, Mia is unable to see her own beauty, but she eventually explores and challenges personal and societal ideals of beauty, allowing readers to experience her thoughts and insecurities. In order to grow and heal, Mia learns from secondary characters and comes to understand her own emotions.