This book is full of Uglies.

     This book is called Uglies by Scott Westerfield. This book is Fiction and is really good. The main themes are that what is on the inside is what counts, and that your perspective on beauty can change.

     A girl named Tally lives in a society where once you turn 16, you become beautiful. Nice, full lips. Large, vulnerable eyes. This creates a false sense of beauty. Tally's Best Friend has already become pretty and she longs to be with him. He lives over in New Pretty town, a town only for pretties, completely separated from the small town for the Uglies. Pretties are allowed to do anything, but becoming pretty comes with a price. Small lesions are inserted into your brain that make you easier to control and make you into a bubblehead. While Tally is waiting to turn 16 and be with her best friend, she meets a new friend, Shay. Shay is outrageous and much a rebel. Shay understands how her society has messed with their perspective of beauty and longs to escape the operation that turns her pretty. She had an opportunity to escape the city before but she was too scared to leave. This time, she is sure she wants to leave. She leaves the day before she turns 16 and runs away. Tally still yearns to become pretty and her day for the operation comes. She is whisked to the hospital and waits in the waiting room for an hour. Her operation never happens. She is then taken to a building on the outskirts of town. The Special Circumstances building. Special Circumstances is a cruel kind of pretty with razor sharp fingernails and teeth, bones made of airplane material and light as a feather, and reflexes like none other. As the name applies, Special Circumstances deal with Special Circumstances. They want information from Tally as to the whereabouts of Shay or she won't be turned Pretty. Lucky for her, Shay left Cryptic directions to the Smoke, a city for run aways escaping the operation. She gives the directions to Special Circumstances but they don't want directions. They want her to travel to the Smoke with a necklace that will send a signal once activated so that Special Circumstances (SC) can take over and destroy the smoke. Tally is unsure what to do. To find out what she does, read the book.
 
  This book was really interesting and memorable. Interesting because it has many twists and turns and gives you a good sense of how the government can be cruel sometimes. Scott Westerfield's opinion, as you can tell from the book, is that a society can mess with your minds and give you different opinions on subject than opinions of people in our society. For one thing, Tally believes she is totally ugly when she is probably beautiful in out society. There is only one kind of beauty in Tally's world. I agree with Scott Westerfield. Even in our society, the definition of beauty has changed. At first, long ago, being larger was beauty because it was said you had  more money. Now, being skinny as a pole and having big butts is the new beauty and lots of people are struggling. Also, this book relates to larger issues our society has. For one thing, the whole point of the operation is to make the city easier to control. Instead of one million opinions to consider, pretties will go along with anything so only one opinion is followed. If our society was like that, our lives would be better. I agree it is still wrong, but the city still had the right idea. In addition, beauty comes wth a price in their society as well as in ours. Although ours is as not great a price, beauty in our society comes with stress, hunger, and a need to always look perfect. No body is perfect, so why try? 

     Altogether, the book was wonderful. There was many details, great pacing, and tons of foreshadowing. I would give this book a definite A. The issues brought up in the book were great points and gave lots of insight in the problems of our society today as well. There are 4 books in the series and all are great, They're called Uglies, Pretties, Specials, and Extras.  If you want to read the series, I advise strongly. All are great and Scott Westerfield is a terrific author,