Nikki reviews: MAKING FACES by Amy Harmon

Title: Making Faces

Author: Amy Harmon

Genre: Contemporary Romance

~Synopsis~

Ambrose Young was beautiful. He was tall and muscular, with hair that touched his shoulders and eyes that burned right through you. The kind of beautiful that graced the covers of romance novels, and Fern Taylor would know. She'd been reading them since she was thirteen. But maybe because he was so beautiful he was never someone Fern thought she could have...until he wasn't beautiful anymore.

Making Faces is the story of a small town where five young men go off to war, and only one comes back. It is the story of loss. Collective loss, individual loss, loss of beauty, loss of life, loss of identity. It is the tale of one girl's love for a broken boy, and a wounded warrior's love for an unremarkable girl. This is a story of friendship that overcomes heartache, heroism that defies the common definitions, and a modern tale of Beauty and the Beast, where we discover that there is a little beauty and a little beast in all of us.

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~Review~

I've been on a hiatus writing book reviews. I owe myself a lot of reviews actually. Can you believe it? I haven't written any reviews for more than a month! Lame, Nikki. I'm too stressed out with work and shit even my reading pace was affected. But here I am, rising from the hibernation because I can not NOT write a review for this book, that would be a crime.

There are books that would totally make you cry, but then after a day, you'd move on with your life and look for another one that could break your heart again. There are a lot of that.

And then there are books that would totally make you cry, all Kleenex gone like there's a shortage of supply around the world. A day after you've finished reading you still find yourself being dragged back to the world that that book created, breaking your heart all over again just thinking about the story. After two days you wake up and feel like "Okay, I think I can start moving on from the story. What to read next?" and still you can't find anything that could totally, totally make you get over a hangover that that certain book has caused you. After a week of trying to start reading a number of books, you can't focus on any of it and haven't finished reading anything, your mind wanders back to the last book you've read breaking your heart again, this time into million of pieces and you have no fucking idea how to piece it back together. There aren't many books like that, but MAKING FACES is one of them.

I devoured Making Faces two straight nights when I was in bed, all my emotions stirred up like a hurricane decided to wreck havoc inside my body. It was one of the most beautiful stories I've ever read. It was all about friendship and unconditional love and more. It was all about finding true beauty in a world of madness. It was..... God, I have no words how to describe this book. I knew me writing a review for it won't make justice but as you can see, I am trying my best.

It started like the usual romance story, a beautiful and well-liked boy oblivious to the existence of a normal but sweet girl. A girl with the biggest heart that nurtures unconditionally. A girl named Fern whose love for her cousin Bailey knows no bounds. She always had a thing for this beautiful and popular boy named Ambrose. She put him on the highest pedestal, like a god or something who's too out of reach for her. Although she finds herself not pretty to deserve a second glance, she has something beautiful inside of her that she doesn't even realize she has: her compassionate heart.

The story of MAKING FACES unfolds beautifully and you will find yourself so immersed in it you'd have difficulty separating your real world from it. It's a story that would fuck with your emotions in a painful but wonderful way.

The synopsis is well-written and when you read it you just want to give it a chance. You give in to your desire to read something without having a clue that the story you're about to read would turn you into a blabbering mess. Half-way through the book, you hope that by the end of the story you still could come out of it unscathed. But you are wrong in so many levels. There is no way you'd finish this story and come out of it empty handed. There are a lot of painful stuff in it, but it was delivered in a way that you would want to experience the pain and not ran away from it. You'd embrace the hurt, because in this book? Pain is equated to a marvelous experience of the different forms of love.

Making Faces playlist:

Echo (Jason Walker)
Hope You Found It (Jason Walker)
Cry (Jason Walker)
In Loving Memory (Alter Bridge)

~Playlist~

The other day I was looking for songs that I could put into my MAKING FACES playlist and I ran into Jason Walker. I started listening to his songs which are mostly heartbreaking and it fit perfectly to my mood when I was writing this review. So yeah, three songs in the playlist is by Jason. I tried looking for a more happy vibe song or a love song for Ambrose and Fern but all I could think about is Bailey, Paulie, Jesse, Grant and even Beans. So sorry if all the songs I picked are sad songs but hey, they're beautiful songs though.

P.S. Thank you to my blog partner for recommending this book to me. I owe you one. And thank you Amy for writing this. And yeah, you owe us a box or two of Kleenex. ;)

Rating:

DIAMOND RECORD

About the Author 

Amy Harmon knew at an early age that writing was something she wanted to do, and she divided her time between writing songs and stories as she grew. Having grown up in the middle of wheat fields without a television, with only her books and her siblings to entertain her, she developed a strong sense of what made a good story. Amy Harmon has been a motivational speaker, a grade school teacher, a junior high teacher, a home school mom, and a member of the Grammy Award winning Saints Unified Voices Choir, directed by Gladys Knight. She released a Christian Blues CD in 2007 called "What I Know" - also available on Amazon and wherever digital music is sold. She has written five novels, Running Barefoot, Slow Dance in Purgatory, Prom Night in Purgatory, the New York Times Bestseller, A Different Blue and Making Faces. 
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