Review Detail

What if you
lived in a world where perfect beauty was the norm and ugly was just a stage of
life? In Scott Westerfelds book Uglies
everyone under the age of sixteen is an Ugly until they turn sixteen, when
they get a surgery and turn Pretty. 
After that there are four stages of Pretty; Young, Middle, Crumbly and
Dead Pretty. Tally Youngblood is the last one of her friends to still be an Ugly.
While waiting for her 16^th birthday to arrive she befriends Shay,
another Ugly, who doesnt believe that her face is hideous because it isnt
perfect or that there is only one way to be pretty. To avoid having becoming
Pretty Shay runs off to the Smokes, a secret hideout for those who want to stay
Ugly, the week before Tally and her turn sixteen. Tally is forced to follow Shay
to the Smoke by the Specials, a fierce group of Pretties who run the government,
and pretend that she came on her own free will. After she gets there Tally is
supposed to activate a special tracker the Specials gave her but once there she
starts to like the Smoke and starts to questions the Specials reason for
wanting to destroy it. Im not going to ruin the book for those of you who
havent read it yet so I wont say anything more.

I love the idea
of writing a book about a society based all around beauty and image. Its also
a little familiar because the way the world is today with millions of people
changing the way they look by surgery a world like the this could be very real
in the near future. The characters are really well developed in the book,
especially Shay, who was my favorite. She was a really radical thinker and not
afraid to be different, which, in this book, was a nice change. When I first
started Uglies I thought it was going
to be boring but there is a lot of plot twists and a completely unexpected
ending.

Tally was the
one part of the book I didnt like. Unlike Shay, she seemed pretty shallow, and
completely believed that she couldnt be pretty for who she was. All the Uglies
where brainwashed into believing this but Tally still vexed me, especially when
she decided that it was better to try to betray her friend than to remain ugly.
Tally was also pretty indecisive; she couldnt decide whether she should betray
the Smoke or become one of them when it was obvious that she loved being there.
(This next part has a minor plot spoiler, sorry) Or how she didnt tell David,
a Smoke man she fell in love with, about how she had originally gone to the
Smoke to betray them all even when they where all alone trying to save the
others from the Specials. Tally knew she would have to tell him sometime but
she kept on putting it off, which made matters worse in the end. If I could I
would change Tally and make her more like Shay and more trusting but it
probably wouldnt have been as good of a book.

If your
thinking about reading this book I recommend it to people who enjoyed the Hunger Games series, the new Lauren
Destefano book Wither, and fans of
other Scott Westerfeld books. Uglies
has a fair amount of action but it also has an underlying message of body image,
individuality and peer-pressure. Overall, this book is a great read unlike any
other book out there. Four out of five stars.