High off of my indulgence in Peeps I decided to give his sci-fi thriller a whirl. After all, I've been watching Alias from the beginning so I've been in a life or death, ridiculously unrealistic, high drama thriller sort of mood. This trilogy delivered all of the above.
Uglies introduces Tally Youngblood's world where people are "ugly" until 16 when they get plastic surgery to make them symmetrical. So Tally gets mixed up with some shady folks and takes off to join a group of renegades who refuse to go pretty and ultimately betrays them. Hoverboards! Psuedo medical speak! Teenage romance! It hits all of the right notes.
And now, the sequel! Tally is now pretty, a sleeper agent of sorts for those rogue uglies. New face. New love. Same bad guys.
I've got the third installment on hold through my lovely local library.
I'm into these books for the same reason I'm into Lost, Alias, and now MI-5. High drama and unlikely scenarios. Emotional meladrama that you've forgotten by the next show. Love affairs between pretty people. What more could you want?
However, like some of my favorite shows it also falls short because it does rely too heavily on the action packed mystery that drives the plot. The characters get little time to develop. And while all the characters in the book talk about how unique and complex Tally is, she isn't really. Her selfishness is rather predictable, and we don't get enough of a breather to look inside her head and get the full effect of what it must be like to be a teenage girl in love with an ugly boy, wanting to be pretty, living with other ugly teenagers and no adults.
But there are hoverboards involved.
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