Tolog Review: Uglies

Uglies
by Scott Westerfeld
reviewed by Christine Nguyen 

“Your personality - the real you inside - was the price of beauty.”

Uglies presents a society where beauty and appearance is priority to happiness. Like all other teenagers in this society, a 15 year old named Tally Youngblood is anxious for for her sixteenth birthday because she knows her life will change. She, like all teenagers of the the age sixteen will undergo an operation to make her posses the qualities of “extreme beauty” and live in a separate city where all the people whom have gone through the operation (called the Pretties) will have a worry-free life of luxury, glam, and pleasure...where everything she wants is now at her will. Tally then meets a girl name Shay who doesn’t believe in the operation and reveals why. Before they know it, the two girls pull themselves in a journey that challenges their beliefs versus society’s.

Uglies is a book that interests teenage readers of all preferences. The book manages to be fun, exciting, adventurous, romantic, and engaging without straying from the storyline. This is the most well written book I have read. In The Uglies, the author writes the book in a way that all teenagers can really relate and feel to. He makes it so that you are Tally Youngblood and you are struggling with this constant struggle to just get through life...whether it be physical or mental. Even though the setting takes place 300 years in the future, the intrinsic problems the character face are the same problems teenagers deal today; the pressure of one’s appearance to fit in, the internal conflict on selfish motives, dealing on making choices of the unknown, all pull this book to the reader. Even after I finished the book, I could not stop think about it because it seemed more like an experience I have went through rather than a book with an imaginative story. Scott Westerfeld (the author) has done an outstanding job of engaging the reader but making sure the reader understands the characters, which made the book alive in my head.

Although I appreciate Scott Westerfeld developing many problems directly correlated to what many teenagers face, the ending did not justify the problems he brought up. I felt the ending moved too fast and was very rushed. The way the characters reacted at the end contradicted to what they would have done based on their personality, which seemed as if the author just wanted to end the book quickly and move on. Nonetheless, Uglies was a very powerful book because of how readers could connect to the characters and the situations they face. Thus I highly recommend this book to every young adult and give this book a rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars.