Uglies Book Review by ChristineMM

Title: Uglies
Author: Scott Westerfeld
Genre: Young Adult Fiction, Dystopian Literature (Book One in a series)

My Star Rating: 4 stars out of 4 = I Liked It

Summary Statement: An Action Packed Dystopian Literature Thriller - Would It Be Great for Everyone to Be Pretty and Equal?

I am a homeschooling mother teaching a dystopian literature class to my grade 9 son and this is one of the young adult selections we are both reading. We both enjoy reading dystopian stories.

I liked UGLIES for its fast action and how it serves as a great "escape read" that pulls you in and carries you away. It is an easy fast read. You feel like you are in the action. The action dominates the story rather than character development though, which is a disappointment for me.

I liked the book, I didn't love it, thus I give it 4 stars. The problem with the book in my opinion is that Westerfeld jumped too fast into the action without having done that magic thing that some writers can do where they inform us about who the character is, who they are as a person, while also making us really care about them.

Tally, the main character is turning 16 but we don't know a lot about her, what we know is she is a superficial non-thinking person who has been brainwashed. She doesn't question the status quo and is a blind follower. When the book starts off she is an unquestioning drone, happy to finally have approached the day when she will turn from an "uglie" to a "pretty" with cosmetic surgery, which is what the government does to everyone when they turn 16.

This is a hero's journey tale so I was disappointed that when Tally was forced with a moral dilemma to turn in a former friend in order to gain access to the surgery to become a "pretty" she quickly agrees (thus making me not like her so much). Furthermore, Tally's lack of common sense and her inability to always think logically to piece together what is really going on shows she is not as bright as I like hero book characters to be. Although her character evolves as the story goes on, and she eventually starts doing more of the right and best thing and to grow into being a non-conformist and a rebel, I would have liked Tally better if she showed those traits from page one. Her stupidity gets people hurt or killed, which was a turn-off. I kept wishing that Tally would just stop and think and put the pieces together but she often did not.

What I liked about the book's story is the issue of a society who has decided that its number one priority is external appearance and has gone to extremes to perform many cosmetic surgeries in people over the course of their lifetimes to keep them looking pretty and good looking and thin and perpetually young. I couldn't help but think about how we are partially there already in America and how even in the USA people are starting to look at the fake created body parts and thinking those are the normal way to look then feeling self-disgust at their natural and normal bodies, and the same for changes in appearance due to natural aging. Thus this book brings up important topics to think about and to hopefully discuss.

Of secondary importance is the issue of eternal partying and pleasure at being drunk for fun which seems to provide total personal fulfillment to the new pretties. Again this is good food for thought for teens.

I enjoyed the aspect of some rebels having left "civilization" in order to live the old-fashioned way and to live off the land. I liked that the others who are called "Smokies" have leared the value of hard work and have developed a strong work ethic.

The book is full of action which is the type that puts it into my category of "this will make a great movie". That also makes it good for reluctant readers or those who desire that their reading be fast paced action stories. However, due to lacking a deeper character development it made me put it in the category of "this may make a better movie than the book is".

My last issue with the book is that I felt that Uglies didn't truly wrap up as a "full book" by the end because I suspect the author's plan from the beginning was to make this a series. At the time I am writing this review, there are five books in the series.

I rate this book 4 stars = I Like It.



Disclosure: I purchased this book for our family's use. For my blog's full disclosure statement see the link near the top of my blog's sidebar.