"Uglies" by Scott Westerfield

Last night, I finished reading the book "Uglies" by Scott Westerfield. If you haven't heard of it, the book is technically teen fiction. It's about a future world where everyone gets an operation on their sixteenth birthday that makes them beautiful. Super-model beautiful. Sounds great, right? Well, it's not that simple.

I don't want to give away the book, but let's just say that there are some kids that don't want to change into a beautiful copy. Some people think that it's our differences that make us beautiful.

From baby to age 12, you are called a "Littlie". When you turn twelve you have to attend a sort of boarding school, and you are called an "Ugly" until you turn sixteen and change into a "Pretty". Simplistic names help keep the novel from getting too confusing, since we all already have associations with words like ugly and pretty. I thought the simplicity of it within this very complex world was clever.

Overall, I loved the book. It was a fast read, and I really grew to love the heroine, Tally. She is an almost sixteen year old who is looking forward to becoming "pretty" just like her best friend (whose birthday was three months before hers). Then she meets Shay, another girl her age who tells her about a secret town called The Smoke, where people have chosen to live rather than go to New Pretty Town to get the operation. At first, Tally doesn't even believe such a place could exist, and she thinks Shay is crazy to want to run away. I mean, who doesn't want to be beautiful? But when Shay leaves, a group of government officials tell Tally that she has to go find The Smoke and alert the government to its location. If she doesn't, they will never turn her pretty.

What Tally decides to do from that point on is what really makes the book great. Some of it is predictable, because you can sort of see where the story is going to go. However, the ending is unique for sure, and it left me wanting to read the second book. Besides, the book can be a little bit predictable simply because the premise of it is so original. It had a very "Fahrenheit 451" feel to it. In some ways, it also reminded me of Ayn Rand's "Anthem" where individualism is considered an evil. The next book in the series is called, as you can imagine, "Pretties."