Tally has mere weeks until she will be eligible for The Surge, and she couldn’t be more excited-until her best friend, Shay, says that she doesn’t want to be pretty, that she’d rather take her chances on living outside the city-states. Once children go through The Surge, they are free to enter the inner section of the city, “New Pretty Town”, where everyone is beautiful and the government provides free food, shelter, and entertainment for all (thus fulfilling the values of Peace and Equality). Students are even encouraged to stop calling each other by their names and to instead assign nicknames to each other, such as “Fatty”, “Zits”, “Squint”, etc. Also during this time they are required to attend middle school and high school as well as being blatantly referred to by all-by each other, their families, and even themselves-as “Uglies”, because of the many physical alterations that occur during puberty. Before that, while they are between the ages of 12 and 16, they live in monitored dorms, away from home and without any physical contact with their families. The Surge is a medical procedure performed on every person when they reach the age of sixteen. The new society holds dearly to three values-Sustainability, Peace, and Equality-and to maintain these values the surviving humans incorporate a mandatory surgery called The Surge. These city-states were established after 98% of the human population was killed by a bacteria epidemic.

The one that Tally lives in is located somewhere in what used to be southern California.

In this version of reality, there is a new society of independently run city-states scattered helter-skelter across the seven continents. On first glance this doesn’t seem all that strange-what girl doesn’t anxiously await her sixteenth birthday? However, then Westerfeld shows us the details of the setting of the dystopia Tally lives in. Here we are introduced to the protagonist: Tally, a 15-year-old girl anxiously awaiting her sixteenth birthday. The first novel in The Uglies series shares this title and was originally published back in 2005. Perhaps most famous of all of his series, however, is also one of his oldest and, perhaps, the most fiercely dystopian: The Uglies series. Over the years, Scott Westerfeld has more than made a name for himself in the genre of Young Adult (YA) novels, most recently with the Leviathan trilogy, which is essentially a steampunk retelling of World War I-complete with piloting large walking machines and living airships!

Uglies pretties series