"The uplifting story of a life-long battle to overcome shyness, bullying, and pain, suffered as a result of 20 facial disfigurement operations. Shelley Hull’s inspirational memoir is a story about growing up as a young girl with facial disfigurement, daring to wish that someday she’d live a normal life, and fit in. It records the journey of a timid, shy child with no self-confidence or worth, experiencing the world of modern medicine, maxillofacial surgery, and setbacks around every corner. The eventually successful surgery included more than 20 operations, the most challenging endured during Shelley’s teenage years. The extremely rare condition led to almost unbearable facial disfigurement and hearing loss which became the subject of one of the case studies in St Thomas’s Hospital consultant Derek Henderson’s Colour Atlas and Textbook of Orthognatic Surgery - The Surgery of Facial Skeletal Deformity. These days Shelley is a confident survivor who seeks to inspire others with her story of hardship, hope and perspective. As she says towards the end of her book, ""scars are on my face and body, but not in my heart"". "
Author
Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets and is widely considered to be among the finest lyric poets of the English language. He is perhaps most famous for such anthology pieces as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, and The Masque of Anarchy. However, his major works were long visionary poems including Alastor, Adonais, The Revolt of Islam, Prometheus Unbound and the unfinished The Triumph of Life. Shelley's unconventional life and uncompromising idealism, combined with his strong skeptical voice, made him a authoritative and much denigrated figure during his life. He became the idol of the next two or three generations of poets, including the major Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite poets Robert Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, as well as William Butler Yeats and poets in other languages such as Jibanananda Das and Subramanya Bharathy. He was also admired by Karl Marx, Henry Stephens Salt, and Bertrand Russell. Famous for his association with his contemporaries John Keats and Lord Byron, he was also married to novelist Mary Shelley.
