Maya's Review: Uglies (Uglies #1) by Scott Westerfeld

Uglies by Scott Westerfeld
Series: Uglies
Genre: Fantasy, Young Adult, Dystopia
Rating: ★★★★
Pages: 448
Published by Simon Pulse on February 8, 2005
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Everybody gets to be supermodel gorgeous. What could be wrong with that?

Tally is about to turn sixteen, and she can't wait. Not for her license - for turning pretty. In Tally's world, your sixteenth birthday brings an operation that turns you from a repellent ugly into a stunningly attractive pretty and catapults you into a high-tech paradise where your only job is to have a really great time. In just a few weeks Tally will be there.

But Tally's new friend Shay isn't sure she wants to be pretty. She'd rather risk life on the outside. When Shay runs away, Tally learns about a whole new side of the pretty world and it isn't very pretty. The authorities offer Tally the worst choice she can imagine: find her friend and turn her in, or never turn pretty at all.

The choice Tally makes changes her world forever...

Okay, so I like a lot of books, by a lot of different people and a lot of other genres, but this has to be one of my all-time favorites. Not just because the plot line was very original – and thank the Lord not necessarily all romance – but the way Westerfeld described the new mentality, the new world and the new apocalypse.

Most of the story revolves around rough descriptions and there is a lot less dialogue than I expected at first, which I honestly liked a lot about this book. The author has a way of describing the scenery around the character which really grabbed me. And the human interactions were solid, Tally and David were a solid almost-couple. Although I didn’t like David with Shay before Tally came along. There was no chemistry what-so-ever between them, and it was unnecessary.

The bit that I liked the most would be the way David and Tally traveled back into town. They would spend days and nights together, and just bond in intense silence. Intense silence that turns into a romance. It was natural and somehow, not forced. Tally and David sound interesting characters on their own, so it isn’t hard to put them together and create a whole new level of perfection.

The climax of the story is quite intense: Tally learns the truth about the operations and must choose between the operation to become a pretty and running off with David.

Maybe the worst part of this book (or the whole series) is that Westerfeld repeats the fact that Tally is responsible for everything. That she blames herself for everything that happened. But by reading the story I understood that what she thought wasn't true.

All in all, this book maintains a solid consistency I like. The pace is good, even a little slow, but I like it that way. The descriptions were perfect, and every little detail was explained. The dialogue, although not equivalent to the descriptions, was amazing. The plot in general is spot on and I love the way he succeeded in transferring the mentality of those people there and it really made me feel like I was in Tally’s world, following her everywhere. Brilliant.