Uglies / Scott Westerfeld

First thing I want to mention is that Uglies is the second book I’ve read on my new ereader, Barnes and Noble’s Nook. I’ve downloaded a number of ebooks over the last couple of years, but only read a few of them. A laptop just isn’t a good form factor for reading books. I’ll have a more comprehensive review of the Nook after I’ve had the chance to read a few more books on it, but at the moment I kinda like the experience. I doubt I’ll completely drop real books ever; ebooks are too ephemeral to own. But for stuff I’m not too concerned about owning a copy of (e.g., John Grisham or other beach reads), I really like it.

On to Uglies. I thought this was a pretty good book, but I don’t actually have a lot to say about it. That’s because I kept mentally comparing it to John Christopher’s The White Mountains and subsequent Tripods trilogy. It’s not the Uglies is worse, better, or even particularly derivative of Christopher’s work. It’s just that a lot of my reactions are the same as my reactions to The White Mountains. The way I want to write about Uglies is to do something detailed about The White Mountains first. But that hasn’t been done here, and I probably won’t return to this particular book even if I do. So… take all this as an acknowledgment of my failure to properly talk about Uglies. (As if anything I do with this blog is proper…)

In the Uglies universe, nearly everyone in this post-apocalyptic society undergoes extensive plastic surgery to make them pretty. Sometime in the past, someone in power decided the problem with society was related to our appearance. You know how studies show that handsome people get better jobs, higher class mates, and are accorded greater respect? To combat that, the powers that be decide to make everyone look equivalent. Not exactly the same. Beautiful people today don’t look all the same, but they do fit in a much narrower spectrum of possible looks. Same thing in Uglies.

Tally Youngblood is about to turn 16, the age when this plastic surgery is done. She misses her childhood friends, because children without the operation are segregated from pretties. But shortly before she is to become pretty herself, she meets Shay. Shay is a freethinker and even more rebellious than Tally. Where Tally pranked younger kids, Shay likes to escape to the off-limits Rusty Ruins well outside the city, where long ago people like us polluted the environment and killed off civilization.

The conflict arises because becoming pretty entails conformity and a loss of individuality, both physically and mentally. Becoming pretty is a rite of passage, but also an induction into fun and games and fuzzy thinking. Shay wants no part of that, and runs away to join a remote village of uglies who live outside of society. The current powers that be cannot stand to have such a place exist, and lean on Tally to squeal on what she knows about Shay.

I was reminded of The White Mountains because it also deals with issues of conformity with a huge dollop of mind control in a dystopian society where some live outside the confines of smallish city states. There are a lot of differences, so this isn’t a case of seen it already and don’t care anymore.

One issue that Westerfeld brought up in the narrative, but that didn’t really get explored, was that of race. Essentially, the operation eliminates race. Some of the new pretties might acquire some vaguely racial features, but conformity is really the game. I’m sure books and stories exist that do explore the elimination of perceived race through the lens of massive plastic surgery, but I think Westerfeld could have provided a great take on it. This paragraph should not be viewed as a criticism so much as wishful thinking on my part.

I really enjoyed the characters, who seemed to all be well-rounded except when given a reason, rather than embodying stock characters. The plot moves along quickly and interestingly. It’s an interesting setting, and the book includes some cool technological ideas like magnetic skateboards.

And one last thing: Tally makes a couple of major mistakes in the book. I really really enjoyed that she owns up to her mistakes, and in a manner that doesn’t minimize them. Not only that, the people she’s harmed with her poor choices don’t instantly forgive and/or forget the transgression. I wish we had more scenes like these around mistakes/apologies/amends in more books. Most that I come across just make me cringe.

Title: Uglies
Author: Scott Westerfeld
Series: Uglies; 1
Imprint / publisher: Simon Pulse / Simon & Schuster
Format: PDF
Length: 425 p.
Publication date: August 2010 (in PDF format)
ISBN-10: 0-689-86538-4