Book review: Uglies, Scott Westerfeld
If there’s one thing Scott Westerfeld is really, really good at, it’s world-building. The guy excels at coming up with these great ideas and then fleshing them out into fully-realised fictional worlds.
The great idea that underpins Uglies: in the not-too-distant future, children have an extreme surgical makeover when they turn 16 that transforms them into “pretties”. Pretties, obviously, are extremely beautiful – their features and proportions tailored to an evolutionary standard of perfection. Pretties also look, more or less, exactly alike: this future society has determined that it was the differences between people of our time (“Rusties”, as they’re dubbed) that made us fight so much. The operation rubs out those differences.
Tally Youngblood is the last of her friends to have the operation. They’ve all become pretties and moved to New Pretty Town – an adolescent utopia of constant fun and parties – leaving her alone in Uglyville.
Until she meets Shay, who’s also on the verge of going under the knife. Except Shay doesn’t want the operation. To Tally’s horror, Shay wants to stay ugly forever. Worse, Shay has a crazy plan: she wants to run away to join a society of dangerous rebels. Dangerous ugly rebels.
The rules and hierarchies of this society are brilliantly complicated (be prepared for some major infodumps dotted throughout the book, though Westerfeld is skilled at weaving them into the plot in a manner that’s rarely heavy-handed), and some of the future technology is just genius – seriously, I need a hoverboard, like, yesterday.
I started reading Uglies for the first time before I read Westerfeld’s more recent book, Leviathan. I stopped reading after a couple of chapters (and didn’t pick it up again till a year later). Similarly, I started to read Pretties, the sequel to Uglies, but I’ve since put that d0wn too. It’s not that I don’t enjoy the books – but there is a certain plodding quality to their pace. Particularly in the early chapters of Uglies, where I felt like Westerfeld deftly set up the first act then draaaaagged it out, then deftly set up the second act then draaaaagged it out.
Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. I bet there’s plenty of readers who will revel (and have revelled, judging by the book’s apparent fanbase) in exploring Westerfeld’s world and getting to know his heroine, Tally. But I have to confess that, on more than one occasion, I skipped to the end of the chapter because I wanted the story to just hurry up.
Tags: Pretties, Scott Westerfeld, Tally Youngblood, Uglies
