Title: Face
Author: Benjamin Zephaniah
Type: Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 208
Rating: 7/10
Benjamin Zephaniah – Face
Face was okay, but it wasn’t Zephaniah’s best – it was a little too preachy, too much like a moral tale, and it took me a while to get into it. Even once I’d been absorbed into the story line, I didn’t enjoy it much, although I did appreciate that the large print made it easy for me to power through it.
It’s just a little too shaky in places, and whilst there aren’t any overt mistakes in terms of grammar and punctuation, I did occasionally find myself being jerked out of the story when somebody behaved strangely or said something unusual. You could tell it was purely for the sake of advancing the moral. And then there was the part where Zephaniah said it was a Friday, and in the following scene it was “the next day” and still Friday, somehow.
Plot-wise, it follows the story of a kid who gets into a car accident and who badly injures his face. It explores the way that – as a society – we take things at face value, and teaches us that what’s inside a person is what counts, and not how they look.
Benjamin Zephaniah
