I originally bought this book to help support a term paper that never really came to fruition, but after some thought and research, I decided the subject of that paper would be something great to expand upon for my graduate school admissions essay.  So I dug out all the books I had intended for that paper, intending to read them all cover to cover instead of just using bits and pieces I'd gleaned from skimming them for support.  Fortunately, Uglies by Scott Westerfield, as well as 2 of the 3 sequels to this book, was one of the first I chose to read.

Uglies is a teen sci-fi novel that, like The Giver, uses a dystopian future to send powerful messages.  The action takes place several hundred years after the fall of the "Rusties," what the people of the future call our modern society.  In this world, all conflict has been solved by a mandatory operation that turns everyone pretty at the age of 16 based on the scientific theories of symmetry and averageness of features equaling beauty, thereby eliminating the differences, such as skin color or traits dominant in people of certain nationalities, that are believed to have caused the wars of the past.  The protagonist, Tally Youngblood, is an Ugly, someone who is under the age of 16 and eagerly awaiting the operation that will turn her pretty like her best friend who was turned pretty a few months before.  Everyone is watched, listened to, and tracked at all times by a ring on their finger and the rooms around them, but the most clever uglies find a way to get around these things.  It is during precisely one of those unmonitored escapades that Tally meets Shay, another ugly who becomes her best friend.  But when Shay runs away to a mysterious place called The Smoke to avoid having the surgery, Tally faces a dilemma: she must either betray her friend by tracking her and revealing the location of The Smoke to a covert governmental department consisting of surgically altered people called Specials or never become pretty at all.

What I think makes this book so special is that at any one time, we never really know more than the characters within it.  The whole world seems to consist of the one city, contained in such a way that a reader wouldn't even be able to imagine an outer world.  As Tally emerges from the confines of Uglyville and begins to learn that there is so much more to her own city and later that there is so much more to the world in its entirety, we are awed with her, humbled by the feeling of never having experienced before.  But it is also this same feature that made me confused about how to rate this book on a scale from 1 to 5.

In the end, I decided that when compared to the books that follow, this book is a 4 out of 5.  While I like the way that the language and sense of discovery made me feel about the world at large in Tally's realm, I'm not entirely sure it was all intentional.  Sometimes I feel that the simple language and completely exposed metaphors for the society at large were in a sense a representation of Tally's unawareness of even the most obvious things happening around her, but at other times I'm convinced that I might be attributing something amazing to the book that isn't really there because of my bias toward its sequels and the story it ultimately leads to.  After all, many series begin with an initial book that pales in comparison to its sequels.  The author gets a grasp of the world he has created, and he evolves with it, making it into something truly noteworthy.  However, because this is a book directed at teens, things might have been made obvious and simplified, clear as day, so as to avoid lengthy philosophizing that could bore the target audience.  Certainly today's youth would be more likely to gravitate toward the Uglies series than to Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Once the way of this book's world is solidly established, it is easy to see the lessons offered.  We learn about the importance of difference in appearance and of individuality inside and out.  That is why I chose this book for my paper, because of the way it deals with the issue of beauty in our society in a context that is directed toward young adults.   It teaches that a lack of individuality and true thought would lead to the ultimate destruction of humanity, as represented in the once-rare orchid that chokes out all other plant life in Tally's world.  It breeds uncontrollably, taking over land and ultimately converting it to desert after a cruel homogenization that destroys populations of pollinators and native species of plants.  We need our differences and our personal freedoms desperately, far more than we need any kind of uniformity and loss of free will, even if that uniformity is beautiful and that loss of free will comes with a surplus society with no limits on anything you could want.  We need culture, and culture springs from difference and from a creativity that can't arise when the only clothes and other items you get come from a hole in the wall and are fully recyclable. 

This book and its sequels is an absolute MUST READ.  I don't know if it will stand the test of time the way The Giver has, but I can assure you that it is a real classic that people of all age ranges should read.