Module 5 -- Uglies



Citation:

Westerfeld, S. (2005) Uglies. New York, NY: Simon Pulse.

Summary:

Tally can't wait for her sixteenth birthday. However, unlike teens today, it's not because she wants to get her driver's license. It's because she wants to be pretty. This story is set in a futuristic society in which all citizens go under the knife at the age of sixteen and leave their physical imperfections behind. They enter into Pretty Town, where their only job is to have fun. Tally's best friend Peris turned sixteen three months before her, leaving her bored and lonely. While Tally waits for her turn to begin living the good life, she meets another "ugly" by the name of Shay. Shay is adventurous and the girls quickly become good friends, but Shay has a secret. She intends to flee from Ugly Town and join a group of runaways living in the wild. When she invites Tally to join her, Tally is against the idea and chooses to wait for her operation. However, when her birthday finally arrives, things don't turn out exactly as she planned. The city authorities refuse to proceed with Tally's operation until she serves as a spy, finds out where the runaways are living, and turns them in. When Tally strikes out to fulfill their demands, she soon learns that the city she grew up in is not the perfect picture that had been painted in her mind. She learns a dark and sinister secret that has her terrified. Can she and the other runaways remain hidden from the authorities?

Impressions:

I thought the story was very clever in its commentary on our society's obsession with looks, race, and the constant striving for perfection. The author does a good job of articulating the main character's inner struggles as she slowly casts off the information she has been fed throughout her life, and begins to think for herself. I did feel that the story dragged in certain parts, and could have very easily been cut down by at least 100 pages without losing any merit or excitement in the plot. Having said that, I did enjoy the book enough to look forward to reading the sequel.

Usage in a Library:

This book provides a good opportunity to pair up with Communities in Schools (CIS) and dialogue with students about body image. The library could host a lunch-time discussion led by the CIS mentors about body image, eating disorders, self-acceptance, and societal expectations found in the media. Following the talk, the librarian could promote book fiction and nonfiction titles that address these issues. The library could then host a follow-up meeting in which students share a summary, their impressions, and what they learned from the book they checked out. At the end of the meeting the students could decide as a group which books were the most helpful, and then create a display in the library window to promote the boosk to other students in the school.

Review:

Dystopian fantasies are uniquely suited to the young adult reader, mainly because the usual story line — the hero realizes that his or her “perfect world” isn’t perfect after all — mirrors the experience of venturing from the relative safety of childhood into the harsher realities of adult life. Whatever the author’s intent, which is usually gloomily political, the story’s psychological underpinning is the adolescent’s shock at learning that some of what you’re taught isn’t true, your parents are flawed human beings and the world isn’t constructed for your benefit. Perhaps that explains why even dystopian novels written for adults, like “1984,” are most powerfully experienced in early adolescence, when Winston Smith’s realization that Big Brother wants to crush him kind of feels like the reader’s real life.

To a young reader, and even to a reader who only remembers being young, the shrewdly satiric premise of Scott Westerfeld’s extraordinarily entertaining series of Uglies novels might not seem dystopian at first: a few hundred years after industrial civilization has destroyed itself in an ecological apocalypse, humankind lives in self-contained city-states surrounded by wilderness. To distract humanity from ravaging nature again, a high-tech version of bread and circuses has been developed: under the age of 16, when you still have the looks you were born with, you’re known as an Ugly, but on your 16th birthday you undergo an operation that turns you into a Pretty — ravishingly if conventionally beautiful — after which you are turned loose in a district known as New Pretty Town and encouraged to party like it’s 1999. After this extended Paris Hilton period, you eventually become a Middle Pretty and have little Uglies of your own, and after that you become a Crumbly (though still a really good-looking one).

On the face of it, it’s an appealing fantasy — what adolescent wouldn’t want to be good-looking and able to party 24/7? — but it isn’t long before the inherent creepiness of a permanent club-kid existence leaches through. The first book of the series, “Uglies” (2005), chronicles the progress of a 16-year-old rebel, Tally Youngblood, as she links up with an alternative society of wilderness dwellers known as the Smoke. The Smoke live off the land and refuse to have the pretty-making operation. Along the way she learns two dirty secrets about the social order she grew up with. The first is that during the operation, your brain is altered, and the second involves a harrowing and morally complicated introduction to her city’s secret police, known as Special Circumstances, or Specials for short, whose surgery makes them smarter, faster and crueler than the average Pretty. In a brilliant touch, Specials are recruited from among the same bright, independent-minded kids who might otherwise rebel, and by the end of “Pretties” (2005), the second book, Tally herself has gone from being an Ugly to a reluctant Pretty to a new recruit in the Specials.

Every plot twist means lots of jaw-dropping action, most of which involves something called a hoverboard, which is basically a flying skateboard. The various hoverboard chases, hoverboard battles and hairbreadth escapes by hoverboard make quidditch look like badminton. Anything you can imagine doing on a flying skateboard, Westerfeld’s got it covered, to the point where all that swooping about begins to smack of commercial calculation, as if the complexity, subtlety and darkness of this world weren’t enough.

But that’s a quibble: even though Tally and the rebels triumph at the end of the third book, “Specials” (2006), their victory is not without its own contradictions, which are explored in the latest volume, “Extras.” Set several years after the end of “Specials,” “Extras” asks what the residents of a newly liberated city might do with their freedom and comes up with a chillingly contemporary answer. The novel’s 15-year-old protagonist, Aya Fuse, lives in a Japanese city where celebrity is the dominant virtue, and where your worth as a human being depends entirely on your face rank, which works like an Amazon ranking: the lower the number, the better you are.

“Extras” is just as thrilling as its predecessors, but it’s also a thoughtful novel of ideas, a brilliant parody of the modern obsession with fame. Like almost everyone else in her world, Aya records everything she does with the help of a semi-sentient hovercam (a sort of floating soccer ball that’s a cross between R2D2 and Weegee), using the resulting footage to boost her face rank. It’s as if the whole world were like Facebook, with every citizen simultaneously a celebrity and his or her own paparazzi. The situation is the opposite of the enforced egalitarianism of beauty in the earlier books; here, Westerfeld slyly shows what happens when you take the brakes off and let the market of media exposure determine individual worth.

With its combination of high-stakes melodrama, cinematic action and thought-provoking insight into some really thorny questions of human nature, the new novel, like its predecessors, is a superb piece of popular art, reminiscent less of other young adult books than of another pop masterpiece, the revived “Battlestar Galactica.” Like Tally in the first book when she runs off to join the Smokies, Aya is a smart if confused girl who hooks up with a group of people who have rejected the fame economy, and together they come across some mysterious nonhumans who have a potentially menacing agenda.

Eventually Tally Youngblood herself — whom Aya admires mainly because she’s the most famous person in the world — shows up for more hoverboard derring-do, but also to deliver perhaps the most resonant line in the book, when she tells an anxious Aya just before the spectacular climax, “You’ll still be real, even with no hovercam watching.” If that’s not quite as chilling as “He loved Big Brother,” it’s still a wonderfully shrewd evocation of the way we live now.

Review Citation:

Hynes, J. (2007, November 11). Looks aren’t everything. [Uglies Series Book Review].  The New York Times. Retrieved from: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/books/review/Hynes-t.html?ref=bookreviews