Scott Westerfeld
Now this was a great book and a great concept. At first, I was a little skeptical, thinking this might be a rip off of one of the countless twilight zone episodes that dealt with beauty in the eye of the beholder or the pressure society places on beauty and sameness. But Scott Westerfeld wades through it all masterfully.
The story (and in fact the trilogy) centers around Tally Youngblood who lives in a future where, at the age of 16, everyone has an operation that makes everyone uniformly pretty. She is the last one of her friends to go through the operation. But weeks before her turn, she meets a fellow "ugly" and they become fast friends. However, this new friend has radical ideas on what real beauty is, which questions everything Tally has been taught to believe.
*POSSIBLE SPOILER BELOW*
Her friend leaves town the day before their operation and leaves Tally a note with directions on where to meet her in the wild if she decided she didn't want to go through with the surgery. Discovering what happened, a group of frightening city officials take Tally away the day of her pretty procedure and explain to her that this is a "Special Circumstance". If she does not lead these officials to her friend and the group of rebel Uglies, she will not get to become pretty and join all of her pretty friends in Pretty Town.
So an A for concept and A for follow through. Definitely left me wanting to read more and avoided major pitfalls that other YA books tend to hit. You will definitely want to continue Tally's adventure in the follow up book,
Pretties.
