Helpful Score: 1
I liked Westerfeld's writing style a lot, enough that I'd like to pick up one of his non-YA SF novels. And I liked this book. However, I would have liked it better if I were around 11 or 12. It reminded me a bit of some of HM Hoover's kids books.
Around 200 years in the future, an apocalypse has occurred (of the non-specified variety). Population has been drastically reduced, and people now live in small, enclosed cities and are told shocking stories of how people in the past lived a destructive, non-environmental lifestyle. (They cut down trees!). Society is rigidly stratified. Young people look forward in anticipation to the day of their Operation - a drastic plastic surgery that will make them beautiful. Until then, they call each other Uglies, insult each other, and dream about how they'll look after that day. After that, of course, they become Pretties, and live in Pretty Town, where they don't associate with Uglies, but live a life of fabulous parties and non-stop fun. In middle age, people settle down and raise children, and then get gracefully old, with more surgeries and life prolongation treatments.
It doesn't sound so bad!
Which, I think, is why Westerfeld had to change the whole hypothesis halfway through the book.
It's impossible to mention this without spoilers - but it's also the main problem with the book. The book is advertised, and it seems like it started out, being about our ideas of attractiveness and individuality, and the importance many people place on their body image. The Ugly/Pretty society depends on the idea that the reason for the surgeries is that uniform beauty (along with a size-controlled population) eliminates racism and prejudice, and allows people to live in harmony.
However, it's discovered that there's a dirty secret - it's discovered that, along with the cosmetic surgeries, the Powers That Be are also giving people a brain surgery to make people happy, non-violent, carefree (and ditzy).
Yep, that's a lot more scary. But it also pretty much nullifies anything that Westerfeld might hve been trying to say about uniform prettiness maybe not being such a good thing. He fails to make that case, and instead brings up a whole other case. And it's not that hard to argue that brain surgery, performed on subjects without their knowledge or consent, to make them easy to manage, is Not A Great Thing.
The other problem I had with the book is a plot thing. The story centers around two friends. One runs away to a group living outside the city, composed of people who haven't had the operation. Special Circumstances, a secret-police force, sends the other one in a spy to find and allow them to eliminate the group, blackmailing the girl with the threat of not being allowed to have The Operation if she fails. However, on the way to find the secret group, the girl encounters a group of environmental rangers from another city, who know about the group, have no desire to eliminate it, and specifically tell her that if life there doesn't work out for her, she could join them in their city and become a ranger herself. So the power of that blackmail should have been effectively eliminated - but it's not even mentioned.
Around 200 years in the future, an apocalypse has occurred (of the non-specified variety). Population has been drastically reduced, and people now live in small, enclosed cities and are told shocking stories of how people in the past lived a destructive, non-environmental lifestyle. (They cut down trees!). Society is rigidly stratified. Young people look forward in anticipation to the day of their Operation - a drastic plastic surgery that will make them beautiful. Until then, they call each other Uglies, insult each other, and dream about how they'll look after that day. After that, of course, they become Pretties, and live in Pretty Town, where they don't associate with Uglies, but live a life of fabulous parties and non-stop fun. In middle age, people settle down and raise children, and then get gracefully old, with more surgeries and life prolongation treatments.
It doesn't sound so bad!
Which, I think, is why Westerfeld had to change the whole hypothesis halfway through the book.
It's impossible to mention this without spoilers - but it's also the main problem with the book. The book is advertised, and it seems like it started out, being about our ideas of attractiveness and individuality, and the importance many people place on their body image. The Ugly/Pretty society depends on the idea that the reason for the surgeries is that uniform beauty (along with a size-controlled population) eliminates racism and prejudice, and allows people to live in harmony.
However, it's discovered that there's a dirty secret - it's discovered that, along with the cosmetic surgeries, the Powers That Be are also giving people a brain surgery to make people happy, non-violent, carefree (and ditzy).
Yep, that's a lot more scary. But it also pretty much nullifies anything that Westerfeld might hve been trying to say about uniform prettiness maybe not being such a good thing. He fails to make that case, and instead brings up a whole other case. And it's not that hard to argue that brain surgery, performed on subjects without their knowledge or consent, to make them easy to manage, is Not A Great Thing.
The other problem I had with the book is a plot thing. The story centers around two friends. One runs away to a group living outside the city, composed of people who haven't had the operation. Special Circumstances, a secret-police force, sends the other one in a spy to find and allow them to eliminate the group, blackmailing the girl with the threat of not being allowed to have The Operation if she fails. However, on the way to find the secret group, the girl encounters a group of environmental rangers from another city, who know about the group, have no desire to eliminate it, and specifically tell her that if life there doesn't work out for her, she could join them in their city and become a ranger herself. So the power of that blackmail should have been effectively eliminated - but it's not even mentioned.
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