Skip to main content
Customer Review
Reviewed in the United States on February 12, 2006
I finished reading Uglies by Scott Westerfeld about ten minutes ago. And I was heartbroken. Heartbroken that the book had ended, that I didn't have the second book. The colorful words and suspensful scenes were highlighted by the smaller details, but even the details were amazing. Every sentence could have won a Newbery Honor. Written in third person, it tells the tale of Tally Youngblood, an 'ugly' who is about to turn sixteen. At sixteen, everyone gets an operation that turns you into a stunningly beautiful being. Tally can't wait for the operation, but when she sneaks into New Pretty town, she meets someone who will change her life -- Shay. Shay is an independent thinker and tries to convince Tally that the operation is wrong; Tally just thinks Shay is crazy. But soon enough, Shay runs to a place called the Smoke, a hidden community for other independant thinkers who want to stay ugly for life. Special Circumstances (a bunch of underground buildings with workers designed to handle out-of-the-ordinary situations) has been trying to find the Smoke for years, and when they find out that Shay is missing, they pull Tally from her pretty operation on her sixteenth birthday. They threaten to keep her as an ugly forever if she doesn't find Shay and the Smoke. Tally agrees to betray her friend and makes the hard journey to the Smoke, but once she's there, she can't bring herself to tattle. Tally decides to stay ugly with her friends at the Smoke... until Special Circumstances arrives a month later and destroys her home. They take hostages, but Tally and her very close friend David manage to get away. Now they must fight back for their friends and cure Shay of the brain damage the operation gives you when you turn pretty.
