Over the past few weeks, I have finished reading the Uglies by Scott Westerfeld. This book was one of the quickest books I have ever read. It wasn't quick in terms of page numbers but quick as in I could never put the book down so I finished it within a week and a half. 

The Uglies is a dystopian novel in which the main character Tally Youngblood embarks on an adventure that would completely reshape her views about the city she lived in. In the novel, Tally’s city is split in half. On one side is where all the uglies live and the other is where all the pretties live. The pretty side of town is the ideal life-parties every day and not a care in the world. In this town, every sixteen-year-old must undergo a mandatory surgery that will turn you from an ugly to a pretty. Tally is enjoying her last days as an ugly when she decided to sneak over into Pretty Town where she meets a girl named Shay. They each share their own thoughts about the surgery and this is when Shay takes the opportunity to tell Tally about The Smoke and how she is going to run away there to live in the wilderness with all the other people who have evaded the surgery. On the night of Tally's surgery, Dr. Cable tells her to travel to The Smoke with a tracking necklace and to activate it once she gets there so the government can capture them. If she doesn't do this Dr. Cable will make sure Tally never gets the surgery to turn pretty. Tally tries to get Dr. cable to change her mind by saying “Please. I've never even spent a whole night outside the city. Not alone” (Westerfeld 130). But she doesn't budge. Tally then makes her journey to The Smoke. When she arrives she meets a boy named David who changes her opinion on everything. After this encounter things start to go downhill for Tally and the smokies. 

One of my favorite thing about this novel was all the imagery Westerfeld used. For example, when I read “ The flowers were so beautiful, so delicate and unthreatening, but they choked everything around them”(Westerfeld 182) a picture was painted into my head of beautiful flowers with their stems reaching out and latching onto everything around them to strangle. Another example of imagery used in the novel is when the author says “Tally flinched at the razor-blade voice, turning away from the anger on the woman’s cruel face” (Westerfeld 129). This quote is describing how Dr. Cable looks. Dr. Cable is a different kind of pretty called a special who has enhanced senses and superhuman abilities so she is described by Tally as looking like a “cruel pretty”. 

The Uglies was the perfect book for me. I love dystopian novels so I thought I would give this book a shot and now I can say that it has to be one of my favorite books I've read. It has everything I look for in a book such as descriptive scenes, adventure, imagery, and a very interesting plot. After finishing this book I immediately started browsing amazon to find the next books in this series.