Review Detail

This book is set in Japan, a few years after the "mind-rain", when Tally Youngblood got rid of the "bubble-heads". Now inew technology, strange surgeries and so on have drastically set apart all the cities of the world. We have a new protagonist in this book, Aya.

There are lots of new aspects of this world, of which I'll only explain a couple, because saying them all would take too long. So, everyone has a "feed", which is basically their own space where they can put things they have done/information about themselves on it. Another different thing is that everyone doesn't get their own free stuff anymore. They get merits for doing work, or just being famous. Everyone wants to be famous, and they've all got their own ranking. In the first three books, Scott told us about how people can't be perfect and humanity's inability to be perfect. In this book, he explained to us the human obsession with popularity and how people can make someone a celebrity in an instant... or un-make them. Also there are all sorts of people. There are "surge-monkeys", those who have extreme surgeries, "tech-heads", those who like creating new inventions, "kickers", those who look for stories to reveal to the world to boost their face rank. Aya is a kicker.

When I was reading the first three books, I sometimes found Tally quite annoying, but she had grown on me by the end of the third book, so I was kind of sad when we had a new protagonist, and was hoping that Tally would reappear. She did.

Okay. The first thing that I want to say about Aya, something that I kept thinking throughout the book. YOU IDIOT AYA, STOP OBSESSING ABOUT YOUR FACE RANK!!! SERIOUSLY! IT's NOT ALL ABOUT THAT! Finished now. No, seriously. Aya was SO obsessed with her face rank throughout the book, basically all she ever thought about was creating a great story to kick to the world. I'm not kidding, if you removed all of Aya's thoughts about kicking a story and boosting a face rank, you would lose two thirds of the book. And I think that Aya didn't really learn her lesson at the end of the book. She should have realised that fame is bogus and totally unprivate, and then become like the Sly Girls at the end, doing dangerous stuff and not caring about her face rank. In fact, at the end, the Sly Girls kind of lost their interest for staying off the charts, which I found annoying, because that's what made them interesting.

I found the setting incredibly confusing. In fact, I didn't know that they lived in Japan and spoke Japanese until they met Tally (yes, she reappears in this book, but she has changed a lot. It is strange to be looking at her from the outside) and Scott was like "She spoke in rapid-fire Japanese" or "She switched to English" or "She was unsure of the English word" or something like that. The city name was not even mentioned once.

If you have enjoyed the other three Uglies books, this is definitely worth checking out, but it isn't as good as the others, in my opinion.