Skin Deep is a perfect early top Juniors, or lower secondary school story. It is just right for those sensitive girls who love the younger range of Jean Ure, Karen McCombie, or Jacqueline Wilson novels. It’s a light, quick, read, but with enough depth to make the reader laugh and cry. The ending moved me – a cynical old nearly fiftysomething – to happy tears.
It’s the first part of a series about a group of four girls, and follows their friendships, families and problems. Thirteen year old Destiny, the subject of this first book, is pretty and confident and a talented cello player. She wants to enter the Bright Sparks competition, a beauty pageant that values talent and brains as well as good looks to prove she is more than a pretty face. But her mother was a model who knows the pitfalls of a world where all is surface and does not approve, but Destiny, with a little help from her friends, gets together the entrance fee and goes for it behind her parents’ backs.
Destiny has the usual hurdles of young teenhood, a crush on a boy at school, confrontations with class bullies, but her life is pretty sweet until she is struck down with Bells’ Palsy. The illness means her face is semi paralysed and Destiny’s world, crumbles.
The novel charts Destiny as she learns to cope with her new self image and put her life back together.
I am sure, if you’ve read so far, you might be thinking there are a million girls’ novels just like this. You might be thinking you’ve read so many books where a pretty sparky heroine, with the help of her friends, learns to deal with whatever life throws at her. Of course it’s a theme we love reading about and this one reads like a dream and zips along beautifully. The writer has a lovely light touch so that the Birmingham setting is invoked just enough, that the friends all have clear individual characters and that Destiny is likeable and believable. It’s well written and warm hearted and would make a perfect back to school present for a Year 5,6, or 7 girl reader.
Did I mention the cover is pitch perfect too?
Tamarind 2011 pb ISBN978 1 848 53054 6