REVIEW: Uglies by Scott Westerfeld

Christmas has come and gone and in the grand tradition of the Jones Family, I gifted my little brother the books I want to read (ah, to be a 13 year old boy). I gave him The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness and Uglies by Scott Westerfeld. Being that my brother is more of the video game playing persuasion than the book reading persuasion, I decided to temporarily knick Uglies (which I had been meaning to read for a while) from him because I figured he wouldn’t miss it for an evening.

Review of Uglies by Scott Westerfeld

Uglies by Scott Westerfeld

It seems odd that I’m not much for science fiction being as I love science and engineering and “what ifs.” I do have select science fiction authors I do love and I’m a huge fan of space operas like Star Wars (but not Star Trek) and Firefly, but as a whole, I don’t dig through this genre often. That being said, Uglies is highly lauded around the publishing blogosphere and the premise interested me so I willingly entered the world of science fiction.

Simply put, in the distant future, all humans undergo a cosmetic operation at the age of 16 to become Pretty. Science has broken the code defining beauty: symmetrical features, wide eyes, high cheekbones, full lips, etc. and to make everyone “equal” based on how we react to each other biologically (regarding looks). This has broken culture down into distinct groups: the pretties (Late, Middle, and New), the uglies, and the littlies.

Anyone who has seen Logan’s Run or The Island or even read Lois Lowry’s The Giver can recognise the tropes: protagonist lives in paradise until a secret in said paradise causes him/her to re-evaluate the world s/he’s lived in his/her whole life. It’s a familiar story and somewhat comforting in its known conclusion, except in the case of Uglies, the ending has a bit of a twist. I liked what Westerfeld did regarding the Pretty culture vs. the Ugly culture; there’s something so very intuitive about naming adolescents Uglies. Oh god, at that age you wish you were anyone but you, when you wished that you could just grow out of your own skin into something that was surely more you than you right now. I can remember being 12 years old and wanting so desperately to be 16 because 16 was the age of glamour, of marginal independence, of driving a car, and the age of fairy tale heroines. At 12, 16 is a sophisticated age and the literalization of that via the cosmetic operation is a stroke of genius.

Overall, I liked Uglies quite a bit, although I wished there was something…more, although I’m not entirely sure what. The slang and innovations in technology were pretty cool (I want a bungee jacket), but sometimes it took me out of the narrative rather than enhancing it. I wanted more of the culture surrounding the Ugly/Pretty dynamic in the first book. In my opinion, it could have been just a tad longer, but I do like my books to be enormous door-stoppers in which I could lose myself for days on end. I would have probably gobbled up these books at 14. Why, oh why must we grow up and lose that sense of obsessive wonder?

My Christmas haul consisted mostly of cash this year (which is fine by me), although I had requested gift certificates for books from my relatives or else art supplies or knitting/craft books/supplies. My uncle hit the mark exactly with a set of Prismacolors and What I Saw and How I Lived by Judy Blundell, but my aunt must have blended my requests together in a Cuisinart because I got two women’s fiction/chick lit books about a knitting circle. I am not a reader of women’s fiction. So Mum and I went to Border’s today to exchange them and I came back with a larger stash than I intended. I got:

• Tales of Beedle the Bard by J. K. Rowling
• Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
• Flora Segunda by Ysabeau Wilce
• Kushiel’s Mercy by Jacqueline Carey

As per usual, my bookstore did not have The Queen of Attolia and The King of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner nor The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson, both of which I had been dying to read. Oh well, I suppose that’s what my $100 giftcard to Amazon is for.

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