Excellent Reads: The Uglies Series

 

So I’m still on a kick of enjoying reading Young Adult novels with dystopian themes. I still haven’t read anything that kicked my butt the way Divergent did, or that I enjoyed nearly as much as the Matched Series. But I have read some good and some bad….and then there is The Uglies, by Scott Westerfeld. Now this is a series to enjoy!

From Amazon: 

“Tally Youngblood is almost 16 and breathlessly eager: On her birthday, like everyone else, she'll undergo extensive surgery to become a Pretty. She's only known life as an Ugly (everyone's considered hideous before surgery), whereas after she "turns," she'll have the huge eyes, perfect skin, and new bone structure that biology and evolution have determined to be objectively beautiful. New Pretties party all day long. But when friend Shay escapes to join a possibly mythical band of outsiders avoiding surgery, Tally follows--not from choice but because the secret police force her….(Kirkus Reviews)”

The series continues into the second book, Pretties, and the third book, Specials. Westerfeld even followed up with a post-trilogy sequel (apparently after much clamoring by fans) called Extras. I very much enjoyed the second and third books but could have done without the fourth.

The premise and world-building of this story are thrillingly unique, and very timely given our culture’s obsession with beauty. Westerfeld has some brilliant things to say about the worship of “prettiness”.

Like most of the YA fare out there currently, this series does feature a love triangle, although a rather limp one at that. Interestingly, the romance and the triangle are not the focus of the story or its action at all. In fact, I would argue that throughout the series the author spent more time and exposition developing Tally’s best-frenemy relationship with Shay than he did her relationships with the two love interests. I think this made the series all the more interesting, particularly since here we have a guy, writing about girl best friendships. He captures the love-hate and competition dynamic well. Who among us hasn’t had a Shay to our Tally?

I also very much enjoyed Westerfeld’s take on pre-Pretty society, the “Rusties”, which is….us. His end-of-the-world scenario is entirely realistic, and his descriptions of our “Rusty Ruins” are spooky, because they feel so real.

All in all, this was a great series—the first three books anyway, skip the fourth—and I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys this genre.