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Fabio Yuji _abioyuji — I've been delving into YA dystopian lit lately, and I've had Scott Westerfeld's The Uglies series on my to-read list for a while. After reading the first book, I can say that it's a really great (if common) premise hampered a bit by the writing/inclusion of a few recent YA tropes. I'll be reading the rest of the series, if only because Westerfeld so wisely ended the first book on a cliffhanger. Otherwise I might not have bothered to seek out the other books. One of the reviewers below me described The Uglies as being similar to the Twilight Zone episode The Eye of the Beholder. When I first picked up the book (and even after I had read through it), I had the same thought: Westerfeld's creation is like The Eye of the Beholder + Number 12 Looks Just Like You (an episode where a young woman resists a surgery that is supposed to help her look like one of a set of "ideal" female bodies). All in all, a very scary concept, and one that seems not too far off from real life where we are all bombarded with messages of a certain kind of beauty--but I'll get to that part later. The Uglies tells the story of Tally Youngblood (ugh. The names in here, like in other YA books, border on the ridiculous. You know, if something is set in a future world, I bet many older names would be back in vogue, since naming trends are cyclic), a young girl looking forward to her sixteenth birthday when she can join her best friend Peris in New Pretty Town after she gets surgery to become a Pretty. The New Pretties, who are basically young adults who get the surgery, live a life of constant hedonism. Tally was always a bit ambivalent about wanting to become a Pretty because when she and Peris used to sneak into New Pretty Town to watch the parties, they used to say that Pretties seemed to loose a piece of their own brains after surgery because they always partied so damn much. She didn't know how right she'd turn out to be. But like most girls, with increased social pressures and the fact that she missed her best friend after Peris got the surgery, she felt more and more confident about her decision to become a Pretty. That is, until she met Shay, who basically tells her that maybe it's not a good idea to become a Pretty after all. Shay says she doesn't want to become a Pretty because she already likes who she is and thinks Tally's cute even without surgery. As the girls grow closer, Shay confesses she has friends who live in a city outside of their own, where people have the choice of whether or not to be a Pretty, and that on their shared birthday, Shay is going to escape to the city called Smoke. Tally refuses to come along but wishes her friend well. She attempts to go to her surgery when the authorities blackmail her into tracking down Shay and the rest of the Smoke residents or else she can't get the surgery. But when Tally finally finds them, learns about their town, and gets close to a certain boy named David, she is torn about where her allegiances lie. There are a few interesting things that I noticed that I hope Westerfeld addresses in future books. One memorable scene is when Shay and Tally are in the Smoke library looking at ancient magazines. Tally notices that the adults all look different from one another, and that nearly all of them don't look like a Pretty should. The only ones that start getting closer to the "look" of a Pretty are the ones that Shay calls models. Westerfeld takes pains to explain that a lot of what's considered attractive in Tally's world is close to what makes people biologically attractive: neotenic (baby-like) features like large eyes and foreheads, symmetry, and "average"ness. In the real world, people do like more symmetrical faces, but a completely symmetric face (such as in Tally's world, when they take your "best side" and double it using a mirror) is considered unnatural. That's why animators try to CGI differences into two sides of a face in cartoons and why beauticians who wax brows say "eyebrows should be sisters, not twins." Thus, I wondered why there wasn't any competition between symmetry and averageness. Averageness tends to be just that: taking the mean of a set of features and using that as a standard. Indeed, many sociological tests use tools to make faces go to extremes (for example, more masculine/more feminine) and find that faces that are averaged tended to rate universally high on people's ratings of attractiveness. However, models themselves, especially high fashion models, tend to have more unique features, or in other words, more "extreme" faces. The Pretty Committee, which is the organization that chooses what people's faces should look close to, decided to make "averaged" faces Pretty. Why didn't they consider modelesque looks, which tend to be highly regarded in this society, pretty? The other thing that I wanted to address was the creepy racial undertones to this story. Pretties are supposed to have wider eyes, smaller noses, and not frizzy hair. And in one part, where Tally plays around with facial morphing software, she lightens Shay's olive skin closer to the baseline for pretty. The baseline skincolor for Pretties must be very white indeed, because while Shay's race isn't specifically mentioned, Shay is described as having green eyes and olive skin. In the real world, this would point to her being a white girl with skin that tans a bit easily, like someone Italian/Greek/Southern European, because I don't know that many minorities with green eyes. The wider eyes thing makes me think that the Asian single-eyelid would not be popular, and the smaller noses with non-kinky hair and light skin thing makes me think that South Asians/Latinos/Native Americans and black people would not fit the mold for ideal beauty either. To me this is very problematic, and if it's not addressed in later books, I'll be quite disappointed because there's so much time in the books spent pointing out how homogeneity is bad for a population. It should be obvious even that there are overtones of the Holocaust in this book, so I'd be pissed if the author (who's white) missed them. I highly doubt an author of color would miss this detail. And finally, the little annoying details that keep me from rating this book higher. Aside from the racial stuff (that's actually a BIG annoying detail), there is for one, the names. I've already addressed this stuff in part earlier in the review, but let me expand on it here. If your copy has the first chapter of the Pretties, you'll notice that Tally calls Shay "Shay-la" and Shay calls Tally "Tally-wa" in the second book. They never call one another by those names in the first book. There's no reason given in the excerpt of why these names are given in the second book. If this is not addressed, it will drive me mad. Another annoying detail is that this book seems to lack complexity in language, and the descriptions are at times ridiculous (cat puke skies? umm...). There are some YA novels that have some wonderful and beautiful language (California Blue and Speak are two off the top of my head), so saying teens can't handle better vocabulary and appreciate tighter writing in general is a lie. Finally is the inclusion of my latest YA novel pet peeve: the love triangle. I'm starting to tire of every adventure/fantasy/scifi YA novel featuring one of these. Pretty much the only YA category that the dreaded love triangle hasn't managed to infiltrate is plain ole contemporary/realistic YA fiction. While this book features the Tally/David/Shay triangle, I think it's obvious that Westerfeld is setting up an overall David/Tally/Peris triangle. This would be the cheapest plot device ever, and I'm convinced that half the reason YA authors have been able to market their books as trilogies/series is because the reader may be tired of the plot but they want to find out who the main character ends up with, dammit. Come to think of it, that's probably why the triangle thing hasn't seeped into realistic YA novels--those don't usually sell in series.