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When last we saw our heroine, Tally Youngblood, she had already been through a number of changes. Classified as an Ugly -- like all pre-sixteen year olds -- she had wanted nothing more than to have the surgery that all kids got on their sixteenth birthday; the surgery that would make her a Pretty.

And then she got the operation, and all that came with being pretty: the symmetrical face; the flawless skin; the rounded eyes; the fuller lips; the brain lesions.

Yes, brain lesions. Scars in the brain tissue that keep all the Pretties "pretty-minded bubbleheads", not thinking too hard about anything, happy to go along with the rules. Pliable. It's a utopia for all -- the citizens, and the city government as well, run behind the scenes by a third over-class of citizens: Special Circumstances. One wouldn't think that the government would intentionally perform brain surgery on all its citizens. It's one out of many visions of Westerfeld that could be considered the most outlandish -- until I saw the CDC reports linking vaccine Thimerosal to outbreaks of autism.

Tally enters prettyhood knowing full well the dangers and risks; but going in, she also knew her friend David, a boy born outside the city, would smuggle in the cure for her. But once she was pretty, she wasn't sure she wanted the cure, and so when the two pills arrived she shared them with her new boyfriend, Zane. The results weren't good. The two pills were a cocktail -- one was a mix of nanos designed to eat away at the brain lesions; the other, a harmless chemical designed to stop the nanos. Zane got the first one. Together, they both became bubbly -- clear-thinking. But the nanos continued to eat away at Zane's brain, damaging him. Tally's clear-headedness had nothing to do with the pills at all -- she had thought her own way out of prettyheadedness.

Now, after having been captured by her former best friend Shay and taken to Special Circumstances, Tally has been remade yet again. Her muscles tissue has been replaced with artificial polymers, her bones with ceramics, and computer circuitry runs beneath it all. She's stronger and faster. Her reflexes are superhuman. And she finally sees why the Specials are in the right. As a member of Shay's special subsect of Specials, the Cutters (named because they like to literally cut themselves to experience the high of brain chemicals the activity induces), she again runs into Zane, who was also captured at the end of Pretties but who is still pretty-minded -- and still damaged

-- Robert Louis Stevenson