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Playing on every teen’s passionate desire to look as good as everybody else, Scott Westerfeld (Midnighters) projects a future world in which a compulsory operation at sixteen wipes out physical differences and makes everyone pretty by conforming to an ideal standard of beauty. The "New Pretties" are then free to play and party, while the younger "Uglies" look on enviously and spend the time before their own transformations in plotting mischievous tricks against their elders. Tally Youngblood is one of the most daring of the Uglies, and her imaginative tricks have gotten her in trouble with the menacing department of Special Circumstances. She has yearned to be pretty, but since her best friend Shay ran away to the rumored rebel settlement of recalcitrant Uglies called The Smoke, Tally has been troubled. The authorities give her an impossible choice: either she follows Shay’s cryptic directions to The Smoke with the purpose of betraying the rebels, or she will never be allowed to become pretty. Hoping to rescue Shay, Tally sets off on the dangerous journey as a spy. But after finally reaching The Smoke she has a change of heart when her new lover David reveals to her the sinister secret behind becoming pretty. The fast-moving story is enlivened by many action sequences in the style of videogames, using intriguing inventions like hoverboards that use the rider’s skateboard skills to skim through the air, and bungee jackets that make wild downward plunges survivable -- and fun. Behind all the commotion is the disturbing vision of our own society -- the Rusties -- visible only in rusting ruins after a virus destroyed all petroleum. Teens will be entranced, and the cliffhanger ending will leave them gasping for the sequel. (Ages 12 and up) --Patty Campbell
From School Library Journal
Grade 7 Up—Scott Westerfield's dystopic young adult novel (S & S, 2005) plays on adolescent changes, both physical and emotional. In this futuristic world, upon reaching their 16th birthday, teens undergo an operation to turn them from an "Ugly" into a thoughtless and vain "Pretty." Tally is nearly 16 and very much anticipating crossing that threshold; her boyfriend, a few months older than she, has already gone "Pretty" and moved to New Pretty Town, where she can visit him only by sneaking there in the dead of night aboard her skateboard. But when Tally meets Shay, another 15-year-old girl, she is nearly talked into running away to join a legendary group of people who have dropped out of society in order to live free of its required operation and social stratification. Almost at the last minute, Tally does follow Shay and quickly finds that she feels comfortable with the people of the Smoke, as these dropouts call their home. And then the dominant society attacks. Carine Montbertrand reads this complicated and thought-provoking fable with energy. Not all of her voice selections for the main characters seem fitting, but the diversity of tone and accent aids listeners in keeping straight a large cast.—Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA
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Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
