Review Detail

I LOVED the concept of this book. How everyone is an "ugly" (a normal person) and then when they turn sixteen they get an operation and become a Pretty (pretty much a person who is perfect in every way).

Tally Youngblood is a fifteen-year-old who is one of many who ABSOLUTELY CAN'T WAIT to become a pretty like the rest of them and join her best friend Peris, who's already over on the other side living the good life. Apparently. Then Tally meets Shay, a VERY tricky ugly (she breaks the rules a lot), and after a while of hanging out, Shay confides to Tally that she doesn't want to become pretty - she wants to escape to a place outside in the wild called the Smoke. Tally refuses to go, btu then in the end she has no choice because Special Circumstances (the bad guys) give her a choice: go to the Smoke and betray them, or never turn pretty at all.

So, in Tally's opinion (a pretty stupid one, if you ask me, actually) there is no choice at all, she si desperate to become a Pretty. So off she goes, to the Smoke.

This book is full of deception upon deception, with choices and this dystopian future in the mix, this book is impossible to put down once you pick it up. I'm serious, I actually did not put this down after I picked it up. I started reading late at night, hoping to settle down before going to sleep, and then I ended up staying up until midnight ( a bad idea, since I had school the next day :P)

I both loved and hated the cliffhanger at the end, and then of course i just had to pick up Pretties, and then the cliffhanger at the end of THAT led me to finish the series in four days flat.

When she learned about how being a Pretty kind of destroys your brain, I really wasn't very surprised. So now the question was this: your looks or your brain? I think the answer is quite obvious, but then of course Shay just had to get herself captured by the Specials and turned into a bubble-brained Pretty.

I thought it was pretty stupid on Tally's count to give herself up to become a Pretty, but then I suppose she was just thinking about the rest of the city and Scot needed a way to continue the series.

About the characters. At the start, I loved Shay even more than Tally, because she was just so fun and daring and thought by herself that I really liked her. But I hated it when she got herself turned into a Pretty and then a Special at the end of Pretties.

This is an amazing book that everyone should give a go.