As a people, we are plainly preoccupied with the picture of perfection; obsessed, essentially, by being beautiful.
But image isn’t everything, much as it may look that way in the day to day. As the protagonist of Tom Pollock’s striking second novel suggests, “This thing—beauty?—it’s arbitrary. People just make it up.” Then again, as Pen’s new partner in thought-crime counters, “Just ’cause something’s made up, doesn’t mean it’s not real.”
All too true. So what’s a poor, disfigured girl to do? A girl whose trust in another—her best friend Beth, no less—led to her being embraced by the barbed wire arms of The City’s Son’s big bad? Whose scars, even after extensive reconstructive surgery, are “a dozen mocking, mirroring mouths” which mark Pen out as other amongst her fearful peers? Why, travel to an alternate dimension where our preconceived ideas about beauty have been completely reconceived; where she’s celebrated, instead, as the most gorgeous girl in all the world!
[Welcome, one and all, to The Glass Republic]