Run by Daisy Whitney at daisywhitney.com

I’ve been having a grand old time here on The BookChick.com talking about books I love and I will definitely keep doing that. BUT, I’ll interrupt our regularly scheduled program for a brief moment to tell you all that I AM GOING TO BE A PUBLISHED AUTHOR! The details are here on my official Web site DaisyWhitney.com (my alter ego — hee hee). The short story is Little Brown is going to publish my young adult novel THE MOCKINGBIRDS and its sequel! I am thrilled beyond words! And I guess now I have to start blogging. Oh, wait, I do that already! Though now I will need to step it up, so tell me all the sites, blogs, places I should be frequenting for teens who read!

What constitutes beauty — perfection or flaws? The answer, or answers, in all of their sizes and shapes are worthy of a book and now they are in a novel. In Justina Chen Headley’s “North of Beautiful,” the protagnonist has been at war with beauty for all of her 17 years. That’s because she was born with a port-wine stain on her face, descending from her eye down to her jaw. She and her mom have spent thousands of dollars on countless procedures and all Terra has to show for it is a Beauty Box full of magazine photos of fashion models and the most expensive makeup to cover up one half of her face.

It isn’t until Terra travels halfway around the world to China that she learns what true beauty is and she finds it over and over in unlikely places and people and things.

“North of Beautiful” isn’t about the story so much as about the ideas. It’s a meditation, in fictional form, on art, beauty and the maps that lead us to who we are, who we aren’t and who we can be.