Pretties { The Uglies #2 }

Title: Pretties

Author: Scott Westerfeld

Ideal Age Range: Young Adult

Mass Market Paperback: 370 pages

Blurb: Gorgeous. Popular. Perfect. Perfectly wrong.

Tally has finally become pretty. Now her looks are beyond perfect, her clothes are awesome, her boyfriend is totally hot, and she's completely popular. It's everything she's ever wanted.

But beneath all the fun -- the nonstop parties, the high-tech luxury, the total freedom -- is a nagging sense that something's wrong. Something important. Then a message from Tally's ugly past arrives. Reading it, Tally remembers what's wrong with pretty life, and the fun stops cold.

Now she has to choose between fighting to forget what she knows and fighting for her life -- because the authorities don't intend to let anyone with this information survive.

My Rating:(★★★★) Pretties starts off several weeks after the conclusion of Uglies, Tally Youngblood’s character has had the surgery that she always wanted, at least before going to the Smoke.  She can barely remember most of her time there, and can’t remember some of it at all.

This book wasn’t as exciting adventure-wise as Uglies.  It had more development of the character of Tally, it added a different love interest, in the character of Zane.  I wasn’t really happy about that, but maybe I shouldn’t have let it bother me at all, because she is a teenager after all.  Love is such a new thing, changing and morphing, plus she had a surgery that erased parts of her memory, it’s a little different for poor Tally than it would be for any normal girl out here in the real world I suppose.

You can’t help but not like the character of Shay, I didn’t really like her that much in Uglies but in Pretties she becomes an enemy without Tally purposefully trying.  Unfortunately that seems to be Tally’s problem, most of the time.  She’s never trying to disappoint, betray or anger her friends, she just is manipulated by the system like everyone else in New Pretty Town, Uglyville, well the whole city I guess.

The ending was a little short feeling.  Like all the loose ends got tied up in a matter of pages, and then you’re left with the knowledge that you have to read the next book to really find out what happens.  Luckily, that didn’t irritate me with this book as much as it has in the past, like when I read The Riddle-Master of Hed by Patricia A. McKillip, or a few other novels.

I’m really into the whole dystopian society sci-fi novels lately, it seems.  I’ll have to break out of this “rut” soon and move onto a different sub-genre of Sci-Fi or run back to the Fantasy shelves at the library.  I might even throw an old fashioned Regency Romance in there somewhere!  J

Happy Reading!

Quotes: "Being pretty-minded is simply the natural state for most people. They want to be vapid and lazy and vain . . . and selfish. It only takes a twist to lock in that part of their personalities."

Similar Titles: Uglies by Scott Westerfeld, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.

What I’m Reading Next: Eldest by Christopher Paolini

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My Rating System:

★ = didn’t like it

★★ = it was ok

★★★ = liked it

★★★★ = really liked it

★★★★★ = it was amazing

© demureconnoisseur/ Stacy Grey