Sometimes when characters go out into the wilderness. Oh, what's that? Did I say 'romance'? Thanks again Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, et al. Luckily, said ugly teens (particularly our protagonist, Tally, through her bff, Shay) discover that if they flee to the wilderness, they will be able to live a life of freedom and romance. Yes, kids, if you let the government give you free health care checkups, it's only a small step to the day they start chopping up your brain. So far so good - it's your basic government-takeover dystopia. Basically, the pretty surgery makes most people stupid, unless the occupation that the government determines for them requires intelligence. Unfortunately (and this is a slight spoiler, so my apologies, but it really is an element that is pretty obvious from page one, though not clearly stated until later), when the kids are having the surgeries to make them pretty, the surgeons change their brains, too, to determine their decision-making abilities, capacity for independent thought, and even sense response. The premise of Uglies is that in the future when kids reach puberty, they all have mandatory plastic surgery to turn their bodies into a perfect standard of beauty based on human brain reactions to visual stimulus. In listing what I don't like about this series, I'll start with EVERYTHING from the characters to the plot to the worldview that I imagine would inspire a story of this kind of depth and breadth of ambivalence. If you read this book there is the danger that you may want to continue with the series, but trust me, you really don't.

I'm posting this review on the link for the first book in the hopes that it will inspire people to put this book on their list of books never to read. In all fairness, as you see, I coughed up three stars for this book, so I will clarify that my empty threatening is really directed toward Pretties and Specials (books two and three in this series). My deep desire not to be arrested for murder would have an epic battle with my need to reach for a weapon when I see his stupid face. I need to never run into Scott Westerfeld down a dark alley, or during a Civil War reenactment, or at Charlton Heston's house, or wherever.

Uglies novel