Uglies

This caught my eye the other day, as I was checking out some other stuff on Amazon (for Queenie's Kitty in fact). I'm mentally wiped out after a year of teaching so a teen trilogy sounded just the ticket.

And Scott Westerfield's Uglies series is not bad. It's not a shivers-up-your-arms classic, but it has enough solid interest to make it worth recommending to someone with young teens who might need a little self-image persepctive in their lives.

Briefly, the series (Uglies, Pretties, and Specials) follows the coming of age of Tally Youngblood, a girl who lives in a future environment where our civilization (the Rusties) imploded centuries ago from our dependance on petroleum. Humanity now lives in environmentally harmonious communities with a sophisticated bioscience industry. Most adults live and work in small suburbs. Children leave their parents to be educated up to the age of sixteen in Dorms. In their late teens early twenties they live in the City, eventually meet a partner, and settle down to the suburbs to produce the next generation, all in a sustainable, green kind of way.

The twist in the tale is all about appearance and conformity. At the age of sixteen, every citizen undergoes major cosmetic surgery. The idea is that if everybody is equally good-looking the desire and envy that subconsciously drive human relationships is eradicated. Disagreements, prejudice, discrimination, favouritism - all are done away with. Pre-Operative children are called Uglies and encouraged to disparage themselves, secure in the knowledge that on their sixteenth birthday they will become Pretty. In Pretty City they party all night and sleep all day. Not surprisingly, you can't wait to grow up.

Tally is scheduled to follow the same path as her parents and her peers, until a problem brings her to the attention of the barely-rumoured to exist Special Circumstances. Told by the Specials that she will not be allowed to turn Pretty until she finds and betrays a community of City runaways who refuse to have the operation, she is exiled into the Wild. There she discovers - surprise, surprise - that the transformation from Ugly to Pretty is a not entirely beneficial tradeoff between security and freedom.

To my jaded old eyes many of the bells and whistles features that other teens have raved about - bungee jackets, hoverboards - are the least interesting elements (but work as handy deus ex machina). Far more engaging is Tally's not always successful struggle against her conditioning and her determination to find her own way.