Assassins have lots of job security in Caverna. Here is a girl incapable of hiding deceit in a land where the elite families are continuously warring behind calculated facial expressions designed to conceal their honest, and often nefarious, intentions. In a land where the wealthiest may have 500 facial expressions to choose from, Neverfell has an infinite range, and each is true to her emotions - which, when discovered, horrifies the people of Caverna.

What Neverfell’s face holds, however, is not some hideous disfigurement, but rather an inability to express anything other than what she feels. On the rare occasions when Grandible has visitors, Neverfell must wear a mask because there is something wrong with her face that others would be aghast to see. For the first seven years of her life in Caverna, all she knows is Grandible and cheese. Neverfell, the preteen heroine, is dropped into the underground tunnels of Grandible the Cheesemaker when she is 5. What Hardinge has created in A Face Like Glass is an expansive, epic adventure that defies description and summary, but this would be a much shorter review if I didn’t at least try to describe and summarize. (It would be understandable if, at this point, you haven’t yet rushed to Amazon to order A Face Like Glass for that YA reader in your life, but hear me out.) In Caverna, such expressions are a sign of prestige and wealth. Oh, and most of the characters in the book are unable to make many facial expressions.

Just to recap, A Face Like Glass is not like Harry Potter and features a lot of ink on cheese-making. With a Costa Book of the Year award to her name for 2015’s The Lie Tree, Hardinge’s reputation stands on its own. So, with a nod of thanks to the trailblazing Rowling, we have A Face Like Glass, which is really nothing like Harry Potter and, as a comparison, is probably a disservice to its author. In Caverna, blessed are the cheesemakers.

In fact, if not for the Harry Potter Effect, the mere notion of a 12-year-old heroine in the magical underground world of Caverna may have been dismissed as unpublishable - especially when the book comes in at just under 500 pages (a tome by YA standards) and its opening section spends a great deal of time on the fine art of cheese-making. It’s not difficult to imagine a world where Frances Hardinge’s new novel wouldn’t have found a publisher. Whatever your thoughts on the boy wizard and his author’s merits, the cultural impact is undeniable as evidenced by any number of touchstones - from the creation of an entire theme park in Orlando to a series of enormously popular movies.īut Rowling’s daring has also created much smaller ripples throughout the publishing industry and, more specifically, in the arena of young-adult literature. Rowling and Harry Potter did for the literary landscape will not be fully realized for years.

A face like glass by frances hardinge