Uglies

An amazing work. The world building in UGLIES is very thorough and believable. I found myself engaged. A mind blowing metaphor for a coming of age story. Don't want to be ugly? Who does. Be careful what you wish for. A worthwhile read.

Uglies is yet another one of those series I started without any idea of the plot (I have got to stop doing that. It's really going to backfire on me someday). All I knew was that it's yet another YA dystopian. I know, I know, the genre is flooded with mediocrity right now, but before you immediately tune out, let me just throw this out there: this one is actually good. PLOT: Uglies follows Tally Youngblood, a 15-year-old girl living in a futuristic society that has decided that the main thing wrong with the world is that attractive people have unfair advantages over the unattractive. The solution? Everyone undergoes cosmetic surgery on their 16th birthday, modifying all their facial and physical features to fit a common standard of perfect beauty. Once the procedure is complete, these former "Uglies" are now allowed to live in beautiful cities with the "Pretties," where their every need is catered to via a hole in the wall (think replicators on Star Trek: TNG), and their only concern is what to wear to the next fabulous party. Tally is eagerly awaiting her operation, passing her time with harmless pranks on the Pretties, until she meets Shay. Shay is also 15, and therefore also an Ugly. As a matter of fact, she and Tally share the same birthday, which means they will have their procedures at the same time. The difference is that Shay doesn't want the procedure. And after unsuccessfully trying to convince Tally to run away with her, Shay disappears. All she leaves behind is a set of cryptic instructions, in case Tally wants to join her. While Tally is concerned for Shay, she doesn't fluctuate in her desire to become a Pretty. She hopes Shay got what she wanted. But soon, Tally will get what she wants too. However, on the day of Tally's procedure, she is presented with an awful choice: go find Shay, and the rebels she has run away with, or stay Ugly forever. Thus begins Tally's journey to the Smoke, the secret rebel hideout that Shay has fled to. All Tally wants is to put this all behind her and become Pretty. Until she finds the Smoke, and starts to question everything she ever believed. MY THOUGHTS: I'll admit, I was a little wary about starting a series that revolves around being pretty. I mean seriously, how much more superficial can you get? I was prepared to be super-annoyed with the shallowness of it all. But once I started reading, I found myself completely absorbed in Tally's world. Mr. Westerfeld actually made me understand how Tally would want nothing more in life than to become Pretty, and managed to do it without making me hate her. No small task. There were a few things I could nitpick about the plot. The endless hoverboarding, for example, made me think someone bet Mr. Westerfeld that he couldn't write an entire book based off of the chase scene in Back to the Future II. Also, I had a little bit of a hard time figuring out how anything actually got accomplished in this world. What I surmised was that the inhabitants of Uglyville go to school, then turn 16 and party hearty for a few years until they hit "Middle Pretty" age and actually start contributing something to society. Not that I could imagine any of them actually wanting to contribute, since it sounds like the Pretty lifestyle was the epitome of luxury and indulgence. Maybe you or I would get tired of living like that, but the Pretties don't seem to mind in the least. Is a workforce consisting entirely of middle-aged ex-partiers (as it's implied that the elderly, or "Crumblies" -- ouch -- also do not work) enough to keep this advanced society running smoothly? Maybe not in the world you and I live in. In the world of Uglies, though, it works. When it comes to YA fiction -- or any fiction, for that matter -- I can almost always poke holes in the logic of the world as it's written. The question I have to ask myself is, "Did I care?" If the answer is yes, it pulls me out of the story and diminishes my enjoyment of the book. With Uglies, the answer was no. I didn't care that not everything made sense. What I cared about was Tally. Was she a perfect character? Heck no. She drove me nuts at times (this is also one of the main downfalls of reading YA lit, period. The protagonists are always teenagers. I am not). But she was fun to read about, her journey was exciting, and I couldn't put the book down until I knew what happened to her.

I absolutely recommend Uglies by Scott Westerfeld. I found it highly entertaining and thought provoking as well. It possessed a suspenseful, exciting plot that captures the reader’s attention. The novel tells a story about a teenage girl named Tally Youngblood who is an "ugly" and anxiously counts down the days until she turns sixteen and can transform into a "pretty". Her daring personality leads her on exhilarating adventures to places beyond the city's boundaries. Through people and events her life changes drastically and so do her opinions about becoming pretty. The reader experiences a small part of Tally's journey through life and as the reader you become connected with her. Through the course of the book Tally blossoms from a rebellious teenager to a mature and selfless young adult within a few months. The reader is able to witness all the relationships that influence Tally and how they transform her and change her views. Uglies encourages readers to reflect on their own lives and society and what effect the standard of pretty has on humans. The book expresses internal beauty’s importance and that there should be no standard for how people look. Looking at our own society similarities may appear concerning humanity’s obsession with pretty. You should read this book to see what revelation Tally makes, what Tally discovers about herself, and how this changes her life. (MQM)

In this futuristic world, there are Uglies and there are Pretties. Main character, Tally is an Ugly, who can't wait for her sixteenth birthday, that magical birthday when all newly 16-year-olds get to undergo plastic surgery to become a Pretty. Once Pretty, she gets to go to the New Prettytown, where a Pretty's only job is to have fun. Everything looks like its going to go according to Tally's plan, until her friend Shay, decides to run away rather than become pretty...And Tally is given the task of tracking her down and bring her back into civilization. I didn't love this book from start to finish, but some parts were definitely more lovable than others. At first the story was hard to get into: Even though the story is told by Tally, who is almost sixteen, her voice seemed to belong to someone much younger than a teenager approaching adulthood. In the beginning it was hard to relate to someone so childlike, but when Tally started meeting with the Agents of Special Circumstance, her innocence worked in the book's favor taking a bad situation and making it so much more disturbing. As Tally goes off on her quest to find Shay, it eventually gets easy to get lost in the adventure of traveling to a secret society by hoverboard. Once she finds the group, you can't help but feel a little bad for her: Society had groomed her to desire artificial beauty and now all she wants it to be pretty; now she's left facing a moral dilemma about how far she's willing to go to get what she wants and who is she willing to hurt...And just as you're beginning to find substance in the story, Scott Westerfeld had to go and cheapen it with a teenage-love triangle. I don't know why so many YA authors want rely on romance to make their stories stick, and I can understand how Tally and David would work as a plot device... Someone needed to make Tally see herself beyond how the government wants her to perceive herself. But why the third person heartbreak? It didn't advance the story and as a subplot, it went no where. I think the morals Scott Westerfeld was trying to express got across clearly, but I think it could have been done better. I understood why he chose simple names for the two classes. Everyone wants to be Pretty, no one wants to be Ugly. But then I read the names of cities: New Prettytown, Uglyville, Crumblytown, Rusty Ruin, and thought, "It's like you're not even trying." Then there were things that weren't ever addressed, things that you'd expect to be addressed in a science fiction novel taking place in a futuristic society: Like why parents aren't involved in their children's lives, what kind of government is in place-->If Special Circumstances are in charge of keeping the peace, who gave them that job? And I was able to guess almost immediately from Shay and Tally's conversations about New Pretty behavior, that more than plastic surgery was going on on the operating table, although, that might be because I'm older than the target audience...(Who else noticed the shameless Smash Mouth shout-out?) In some ways, Tally seemed to mature with the story, in others she regressed. The more pressures she had to deal with, the smarter she became, making decisions cautiously, instead of impulsively. On the other hand, there were numerous time where she could have and should have told the truth, and each time choosing to invent foolish, elaborate lies, rather than asking for help. Which make her a bit of an oxymoron in the end; she wants to do the right thing by her friends, but doesn't care how many people get hurt by her lies. This book was certainly based on a thought provoking premise, but the story fell short of the concept.

If you think the "photoshop disasters" of today make people insecure, you haven't seen anything anything yet. In the future, as portrayed in Uglies, we won't need such things as we'll be told almost from day one that we are, in fact, Ugly. But never fear, on our sixteenth birthdays we'll be fixed! Every scar we got in falling off our bikes as kids? Erased when they replace our skin with new perfect skin. Our bones molded and shaped to perfection. our eyes? The same. We'll be molded into something oh so pretty. Unless, could the rumors be true? Could there be people who dare to live out in the ruins of the old world, aging naturally, and UGLY? Living as people used to do before we wised up and learned how to be so perfect? This book examines how important it is for us all to not only look but also think differently. At what price does perfection come? Yeah, yeah... a fictional book with messages. Not something everyone will like, but I don't usually like books tagged with "Science Fiction" and "Adventure" as much as I like books tagged with "Fantasy" and I loved this. So for this book to get 5 stars from me, it had to do something right.

In the futuristic story, Uglies, Tally Youngblood has been looking forward to becoming pretty since she was old enough to talk. Tally’s world changes when she meets Shea months before turning pretty on her sixteenth birthday. Shea is the same age as Tally but has a different opinion then everyone else in their world—she doesn’t want to turn pretty. Tally starts to think like Shea the more she spends time with her and starts to realize that being pretty isn’t the only thing that matters in life. The idea that one might not want to turn pretty is foreign in their world. Westerfeld does a great job at taking today’s society and their views of beautiful and putting it into a thrilling story that readers can’t put down. He explains that if we continue on the path where all we judge about a person is their looks than we will end up in a world full of boring and ordinary people. Westerfeld specifically reaches out to his young adult and teenage audience trying to send out a message that your outside appearance isn’t everything and that being your own person and being unique isn’t a bad thing. Westerfeld uses techniques such as imagery, references to today’s world, cliffhangers, metaphors, and much more to keep the reader interested and engaged. Scott Westerfeld makes it seem as if the reader personally knows Tally as a friend. They feel her hurting and her happiness and encourage her to do the right thing throughout the whole story. Uglies is a story that will have you on the edge of your seat wondering what Tally will come across and how she’ll face the many obstacles she’s faced with. I would highly recommend this novel for a teenager looking to relate to a book that makes them not want to turn away from the story.

4.5 ★ I discovered Uglies during my senior year of high school. It was the first novel I had read by Scott Westerfeld, and it would not be the last. I had read it several times and consider it one of my favorite books, but it had been a few years since I had read it. I decided to reread it before watching a movie on Netflix. It reminded me of why I loved this book so much, one of which was because it was unlike anything I had ever read before. I have a feeling that I will be returning to this book again in the future. <b> Uglies </b> is the type of novel; you'll be observing not just the story but also the character's lives; by the middle of the book, I felt as if most of them had become my friends. Every page and chapter kept me on the edge of my seat, wondering how things would turn out for Tally and the rest of her friends. There was something about Tally; you couldn't help but love her, yet there were times when you found yourself questioning her decisions. A part of me understood why she took that decision, but I was also concerned that she would be exposed, and things would not go well for her. I found myself praying she wouldn't go through it and that no one would discover out why she went after Shay. I was mostly anxious about David and what he would think, given how much he cared for Tally. I was also intrigued about the Specials, and whether they would transform everyone pretty if they found them, as well as why they wanted to go through all this effort. There was something that they were hiding. Despite having read it before, I couldn't get enough of the story; it kept running through my mind. This is not like any other fantasy story you've read before. You'll want to read the next book straight away to learn what happens to Tally, Shay, David, and the rest of the characters. I am eager to see how the movie turned out.

At 16 you get the operation to make you Pretty and you move across the river and live a beautiful life. At least that is what it looks like. Her best friend Peris is already a Pretty. He promised he would not forget her and keep in touch, but he seems to have forgotten about her. She finds another girl, Shay, whose friends are all gone. Some are Pretties and some have left for The Smoke and David. A mysterious and maybe made up city where no one is Pretty. Where Uglies go and stay Ugly. The night before they are to become Pretty (they share a birthday) Shay leaves to go to The Smoke, and all she leaves Tally are cryptic directions to The Smoke in case Tally wants to follow. On the day Tally is to turn Pretty, Dr. Cable takes her to a different location called Special Circumstances and informs her that until she brings Shay back and helps find The Smoke she will not be Pretty. Tally has to decide if she is going to betray her friends or be what she has been waiting for her whole life, even if it is not as great as she believed.

This is a clever, fast-paced and exciting novel that takes the current pre-occupation with beauty and jumps forward several hundred years to create a world wherein almost everyone gets an operation at the age of 16 to make them Pretty. Scott Westerfeld envisages a cataclysmic event in the near future where the genetic mutation of oil sets off a chain of events that kills millions of people (known in the future as Rusties) and destroys cities. In Tally's world, people live in split cities, with the Pretties living in a non-stop partyland of appartment blocks and firework displays and the Uglies (those waiting until they turn 16 and can get the operation to turn Pretty) who live in dorm buildings, dreaming of how they will look after the op and offsetting their humdrum lives by playing tricks. On her way back from trying to see her friend Peris in New Pretty Town, Tally meets Shay, a girl who shares her birthday. Whilst they're waiting for the operation, they form a friendship wherein Shay teaches Tally to hoverboard and takes her out to the ruins of the Rusties' world to ride the tracks of a rollercoaster on their hoverboards. As their friendship deepends, Shay confides in Tally about the existence of a place called the Smoke (where people live who don't want to turn Pretty) and of David, a boy who can take them there. Unlike Shay however, Tally dreams of being Pretty and refuses to join Shay in searching for the Smoke. It's only after Shay runs away one night, leaving cryptic instructions on how to find her that Tally starts to learn about the more sinister side of New Pretty Town and the existence of Special Circumstances, modified and cruel Pretties who force her to find and betray her friend. Westerfeld's writing is slick and tense and he effortlessly introduces the reader to his central concepts without ever going into turgid passages of exposition. I found it very easy to believe in Tally and her dilemma, not least because Westerfeld first introduces Tally's friend Peris who has already turned Pretty and who was Tally's best friend whilst they were both Uglies. Tally's search for the Smoke could have been long and drawn out, but Westerfeld keeps it fast-moving and whilst he places Tally in danger, he never over-eggs the pudding and also takes the opportunity to introduce further elements of world building - I particularly liked the idea of genetically modified orchids spreading out over the world, destroying the ecosystems and needing to be constantly flamed and beaten back by Rangers. I also loved his depictions of bungy jackets, hoverboards and belly sensors, all of which could easily have descended into MacGuffins in lesser hands but which never stop being convinving. Particularly poignant is his look back at the world in which we live in, and whilst I think his depiction of anorexia was a little too in-passing to be effective, it's nevertheless reassuring to read a book that does not equate being Pretty with being thin. The Specials are an intimidating and cruel bunch and whilst I would have liked to see a bit more about Dr Cable beyond cold cruelty, the set-up is there for more development in the rest of the quartet, which I'm very much looking forward to reading. In fact, the way Westerfeld ends the book is a superb example of a how to handle a cliffhanger whilst resolving the initial storyline. None of the characters are left dangling on the page and you feel as though you've read a great story whilst also wanting to find out what will happen next to David, Tally and Shay. The only picky thing I can think of to say is that I wonder why Tally is so sure that her plan will work given what's already happened between her and Special Circumstances, which would seem to me to suggest that it couldn't. However like I said, it's a picky thing to say and it certainly isn't enough to put me off reading the rest. All in all, it's an excellent read and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it.

This is the second time I’m reading it with students in class. It’s a rather easy read, but there are so many themes to talk about. Definitely a recommendation!

Consegna perfetta. La storia ridicola, non lo consiglio

One of the best dystopian books out there.

Me parece un buen inicio, sin duda me atrapo y no dudo que continuare con los siguientes libros. Es bastante ligero y dinámico. El libro llego un poquito sucio de la portada pero nada problemático.