Author: Scott Westerfeld
Publisher: Simon Pulse
Pages: 406
The very first sentence read, The early summer sky was the color of cat vomit. Even though it tried to express beauty in comparison with an unpleasant bodily function, I was not left with feelings of disgust or distaste.
Perhaps it is true when they say that beauty is relative.
So apt in a novel which packs a punch around the issue of
beauty.
Tally Youngblood has lost her best friend, Peris. He has
moved to New Pretty Town, after having turned pretty. In this world, turning 16
entitles you to undergo a series of surgeries that will make you beautiful. Being
Ugly is of no worth in this world, and that is why on hitting puberty, every
boy and girl dreams of turning pretty.
There was something magic in their large and perfect eyes,
something that made you want to pay attention to whatever they said, to protect
them from any danger, to make them happy. They were so…pretty.
Like our real world, there are all kinds of advantages in
being pretty, including being able to sleep as late as one wants to, and enjoying
a life of non-stop partying and luxury.
Tally, who lives in Uglyville, sneaks into New Pretty Town
to meet Peris. She finds that the friendship is no longer important to him.
Tally can’t wait to turn 16 and be a part of that world. On her way back, she
meets Shay, another Ugly girl, who shares the same birthday.
Shay quickly fills
in the void left by Peris. The two girls begin a friendship that brings comfort
to both as they await their 16th birthdays and their chance to turn
pretty. Tally looks forward to undergoing the surgery along with Shay and
spending their lives having fun.
But Shay, it appears, does not want to turn pretty. She does
not buy into that culture, and even tries to talk Tally into staying Ugly. She
tells her of a place called Smoke, where a guy called David has organized a
group of people who have chosen not to turn pretty, yet lead happy,
unprogrammed lives.
A week before her birthday, Shay decides to run away to the
Smoke. Tally refuses to go with her.
And yet Tally’s birthday brings disappointment. Special
Circumstances, a group that controls the city, threatens her with a lifetime of
ugliness unless she leads them to the Smoke. Tally has promised Shay that she
won’t betray her but she has also promised Peris that she will turn pretty
soon. Choosing to keep her promise to Peris, Tally, armed with cryptic
directions given to her by Shay and a pendant that will lead Special
Circumstances to the Smoke, sets out. Now she is a spy for Special Circumstances.
Reaching the Smoke, Tally renews her friendship with Shay
and befriends David and the others, looking for the opportunity to activate the
pendant and get pretty. Until David and his parents reveal to her the truth
about being pretty.
In the Smoke, Tally learns how the Uglies there trade their
belongings for food and clothing. Everything has value and history, and here we
are rejecting everything for something else, trading the intangible for the
intangible.
David’s description of newspapers, like books, but you
threw them away, and got a new one everyday, gives us an idea of just how
wasteful we are.
No wonder Tally’s world thinks of us as an idiotic, dangerous
and sometimes comic force of history. But as David reminds her, Every
civilization has its weakness. There’s always one thing we depend on. And if
someone takes it away, all that’s left is some story in a history class.
Pretties have a lot of luck. They are seen as healthy and
loved, and preferred as potential spouses. The novel invokes evolutionary
biology and how humankind came to equate the beautiful with health and
strength, seeing beauty as desirable.
This is truly an interesting world, a world where plastic
recycles itself. Tally chews a toothbrush pill and wears an interface ring
which lets her interact with inanimate objects.
The story is written from the third person point of view of
Tally. In Tally, we have a heroine who opts to do something patently unheroic
as breaking a promise and spying on her own friend. She deludes herself into
thinking that Shay is misguided and that she must bring her back home.
Set in the distant future, when people like us, who are
called Rusties, are long dead. In their History classes in school, young Uglies
learn that the past included a time when people killed one another over skin
colour, and taller and more good-looking folk got better jobs, spouses, and the
best of everything. Sounds familiar?
In this world, the Rusties lived a lifestyle, much like
ours, more than 300 years before Tally’s time. It is a lifestyle that demanded
constant pillaging of the earth’s resources. The criticism of the Rusties also
makes a point about our vacuous entertainment options.
Much of the story felt harsh, like a critique, or worse,
like an indictment of our way of living, which has threatened and destroyed our
world.
In reading about what Tally thought of the Rusties, I was
reminded that, as a people, we are truly Ugly, not for our physical
imperfections but for the ugliness that we spread around and leave behind. The
Rusties were totally savage, like we are today.
And yet, not everything that the Rusties did was a waste.
The railroads have their uses, but Tally still can’t understand their tendency
to blast through mountains to fix tracks in straight lines. One particular
sentence hit home: Whole rain forests had been consumed, reduced from millions
of interlocking species to a bunch of cows eating grass, a vast web of life
traded for cheap hamburgers.
Because the locale is so harsh in this dystopian world, the
writing feels urgent and true.
The new world is divided into new pretty, middle pretty,
late pretty and dead pretty, and keeping watch over them are a group of people
known as Special Circumstances.
This is a world of survivalist tendencies. Dystopian on
account of its perceived utopianness.
The book ends on the cusp of a sequel, with Tally receiving
a chance to redeem herself and save the others.
I look forward to reading, Pretties, the second in the
series.
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