Skin Deep is a sincere and heart-felt look at a teenager's struggle to come to terms with her mother's mortality while struggling with her own ideas of beauty. When her mother suddenly announces that she has breast cancer, Cori's world seems to end. Things that once seemed so important to her no longer matter -- it's hard to care if your hair is flat-ironed when your mother's is falling out due to chemo. For Corinne, this summer she is learning who she really is underneath, and who her real friends are. Hot on the heels of her previous YA novel, Out, acclaimed children's writer Sandra Diersch tackles another tough issue in Skin Deep. To do so, she turned to her former teacher and breast cancer survivor Gerri London for help. Gerri draws on her own experiences to provide the touching journal entries of Cori's mother. These serve to shape the novel and give each of the characters lives of their own.