Uglies

            Uglies is a book by Scott Westerfeld that is all about plastic surgery and living in a conformed society. In regards to my last blog post, Mean Girls, this blog post is going to be centered on the same idea of beauty/ugliness.

            So all the way back in 7^th grade (wow, four years ago, I’m getting old) I read a book for my language arts class called Uglies. I actually chose to read this book because it was back when the language arts teachers I had let us read what we wanted that wasn’t made only in the 19^th century. So the goal of the class was to read this 425 page book; which I had already wanted to read it, so I finished it all over the weekend and began to read the next book in the series. So this series actually has four books in it the first is called Uglies, the second Pretties, the third Specials, and the fourth Extras. I have read all four of the books, my opinion the fourth book isn’t all that great, but the series as a whole is a rather simple to comprehend and has a well established story line going.

            So now to actually talk about the book and not just tell my own personal narrative of how/why/when I read the book (oh, I forgot to add I had wanted to read it because my sister had read it before). I’m not going to lie, I hardly remember the exact details of this series because I’ve read so many series that sometimes I mess up names and details from one series into another, but considering I have the book sitting right next to me as I’m blogging this blog post….I can tell you that the main character is Tally and she has a friend named Shay who is quite rebellious. Anyway, the main thing to get from this story (at least the first book) is that society shouldn’t be conformed in the way that you have to get plastic surgery to be controlled by the government.

Now that I’m thinking of the series as a whole I feel like if I reread the series I would probably understand the concepts better than I did when I was in 7^th grade….But I really do think this series teaches a lot about loving who you are and you don’t need to be ‘pretty’. At the beginning of the book that’s all that Tally could hope for is becoming pretty, but really prettiness is all a matter of perspective and if Tally and all the other people in the book would have just realized they already are pretty than the government would never have been controlling them. I just think that this was a very fulfilling series to read, and though I don’t remember a lot of it, I remember the main ideas and think that this is an amazing book for middle schoolers and even some high schoolers to read because it’s all about accepting yourself (and being a rebel!)