A Unique Love Story

Christmas is around the corner and for some of our library patrons, this is the perfect time to settle in and catch up on some reading! I am not a big fan of "love stories," so I was amused at myself when I picked up Jacquelyn Mitchard's newest book, Second Nature. I enjoyed reading Mitchard's Deep End of the Ocean and I exprected to like this book as much as that one. I was not wrong! Second Nature is a very unique book. The heroine of the story is Sicily, a young woman who was badly burned in a fire when she was young, and was saved by her firefighter dad, who was killed in the fire, as were most of her classmates. Sicily lives her life disfigured, until a surgeon searches her out for a face transplant. The rest of the story details her life after the transplant and discusses how she experiences many things for the first time. The story is beautiful and the writing is exquisite. Sicily is a brave heroine who exemplifiies the meaning of grace under pressure and every character in this book is richly complicated. The book's action covers many seasons, and the description of the Christmas one is especially beautiful. If you love family and relationship drama, mixed in with the bittersweetness of love, you will enjoy every minute of this book.