Frances Hardinge's A Face Like Glass

You know you look great. Great. Painfully stunning. Then the person waiting for you looks up and their face says you are the last thing they want to see and possibly you also have half a biscuit stuck in your teeth.

It sucks to see disappointment, fear (unless you are trying to scare someone) or disgust (maybe you picked that nose on purpose, who knows) on a face, but it's still information to help us process the situation.

We need people's faces - nonverbal communication typically counting for more than half of the information exchanged in our conversations to give us clues.  Now imagine a society where everyone just has a series of learned configurations to represent everything they are feeling or thinking.  It's somewhere between this at birth:

or maybe these guys later, depending on your financial state because learning new expressions actually costs money.

   In A Face Like Glass, we meet Neverfell, a preteen orphan with a past she can't remember, who is growing up in Caverna, a sprawling underground civilisation that was created after horrible things devastated the cities on the surface.  Many generations later, the inhabitants still don't believe it is safe to leave so they party/drudge/court eyesight problems and asthma in their city below.  It's a very hierarchical scene with drudges doing all the dirty work, tradesmen making delicacies just to keep their ruler The Steward from getting bored and nobility playing mind games.

   Of course there's a statement about injustice and entitlement, but the part of the book that just kept fascinating me and creeping me right the hell out was the facial thing. Caverna infants come out "blank as eggs" and are taught a few expressions during their time in massive crèches. Lower-class babies are taught about what you'd expect for a servant (i.e., automaton who can't complain), usually amounting to only 3 or 4 expressions.  No matter if they are sick, dying, furious, joyful or what; they can only make the "I'm eager to serve" or "I understand your need to punish me" or "I'm happy that I sleep on rocks" faces. Upper-class kids are given more and can buy lessons from Facesmiths ("Face 57, the Willow Bows Before the Gale" is an actual thing) as they get older.

   The unique Neverfell has a 'face like glass,' in that it allows you to see through to whatever she is thinking or feeling. No Facesmiths required, lots of suspicions raised. Of course this makes her very special and very upsetting to the status quo.  When she gets caught up in a rich girl's scheme, Neverfell starts seeing things she can't unsee and finding out more about who she is - and why it's so important that nobody rocks The Steward's boat.

   Her story was frustrating at times but that actually worked to make it more believable. Of course someone's going to get busted half a dozen times when they have no Face 372, Dawn Breaking Over Ohio or whatever to cover up their intentions. Hardinge does a good job of building a world that is sprawling and vivid - it startled me all over again when someone's carriage was hoisted from cave to cave or people fed the lamps hanging over everything. I felt like I was right there (and then remembered I was also claustrophobic.  Maybe don't read this in a small, enclosed space.)

   Usually I refuse to recommend post-apocalyptic stories but this was so far post and the scenario was so strange that I just have to tell people to read it. Also there's no teen romance, vampires or boarding schools, so if you're inundated with all three, this is a nice break.  Hope you enjoy the book, try Hardinge's other work or, at the very least, feel relieved that all those cringeworthy selfie faces didn't have to be paid for.