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""Imagine you're in art class. The teacher drops a lump of wet, sticky clay on th bench in front of you.
"You've got thirty minutes to sculpt a newborn baby's face," she says"(1).
"Your sculpture looks ruined. The little nose you made has been squashed by a giant clay splotch spread across the face. It has been pushed so hard into the face that the beautiful eyes you made are now way farther apart than they should be. The extra time you'd put into getting the size and shape of the head just right is totally wasted too. It's bumpy and broken. Imagine what that sculpture looks like now, and you'll know what I looked like when I was born"(3).

I thought this was a unique approach to starting a story. There is a lot of imagery and it really helps to put a picture into the reader's mind. The scene writing in the first couple pages of the book were what stood out to me the most. Throughout the book, the author continues to use this imagery to explain how the surgeries were changing his appearance.

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"The lump was a massive bulge that jutted out from the top of my forehead and ran all the way down to the tip of where my nose should have been. It was also twice the size of my newborn fist. It had formed early during my development and made a mess of my face, pushing my eyes to either side of my head. Like a fish. That wasn't all. Looking down at me, the doctors saw that both my legs were mangled. The right leg was only three-quarters as long as it should have been and had a small foot bent backwards at a very strange angle. The foot had four toes, and two of them were partially joined together. My left leg was even shorter and only had two toes. Both looked bent and broken"(Hoge 4-5).

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His mother knew there was something wrong with her child, but she didn't know how bad. Originally she was scared to see him for the first time. When she saw her child, she felt nothing for the baby and refused to take it home. His father was willing to go with whatever his wife decided and didn't want to persuade her otherwise. Eventually, she brought her child home, but was too embarassed to take him out of the house besides for appointments. She didn't feel comfortable with him until she heard another couple talking about her child and she stood up for him.

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Robert spent a lot of his childhood in the hospital. Since he was 5 days old, he received 24 surgeries to fix the way he looked and make him appear more "normal". With each of his surgeries, his parents told him the plan and he would just follow along. Robert was never asked if he wanted to do the surgery. When he was 14 years old, right before he was about to get his last big surgery that would make him look the most like everyone else, his parents decided that it was his decision whether he wanted to have the surgery. As Robert was starting high school, he was starting to feel more confident with how he looked and realized that he became who he was because of his ugliness and disabilities. With that, he promised himself that he would never have any other operations to fix his appearance.

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Robert alway liked being active and outdoors. He didn't get to participate in many team sports because he either wasn't good enough, or his parents and doctors advised him not to. With all the work they did to make his face look more normal, they couldn't risk damaging it. Robert always wanted to play rugby, but wasn't allowed, so he helped coach the team at a couple practices. With his prostetic legs, he ran races. He was never really fast and would fall on his hands a lot but he still enjoyed it. He also took swimming lessons and was really good at it, but his short legs gave him a dissadvantage. They tried lots of methods to make him flippers, but they didn't stay on. The one thing that Robert was really good at were Lawn Bowls. He loved learning how to play every week with an old man named Frank that later coached him on a team and made him a cane for paying. Robert had trouble participating in normal sport activities, but his disability never held him back from trying.

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When Robert started school he realized that he wasn't that different from other people because, "Each one had something different about them. I just had idfferent differences"(54).

Everything that Robert participated was "a small victory in the battle to be less different from everyone else"(80).

When Robert joined a lawn bowl team, "Once again my disability had restricted my choices, but then driven me to new ones that seemed so much better than anything else could have been"(176-177).