Extra Read All About The Pretty Ugly Specials!

Ha see what I did with that title, I cleverly put in all the names of Scott Westerfelds Uglies series into a cute little sentence I AM A GENIUS (also maybe a tad bit to much of the vino).  To be honest I don't even remember buying the first book in the series (Uglies) but I am very glad I did.  

Mr. Westerfeld sets this story in an undetermined future here on Earth sometime after an oil eating virus/bacteria had been unleashed effectively bringing the modern world to a halt.  In this new era society (or at least most of what we are introduced to) has let the Earth recover by keeping to strictly enforced cities.  These cities are divided up mostly by age.  At the start of our story Tally Youngblood who is coming up on her 16th birthday sneaks off to spy on the island where the "Pretties" live.  Our young Tally is an "Ugly" which is what kids call themselves after age 11 until they turn 16 and are taken to be surgically perfected into Pretties and live their teen years in the city of New Pretty not doing a whole lot of anything other then party and have fun.

 Once they have gotten all the high life out of there systems they are then trained for jobs to work until they get to old and go off to finish off their lives as "Crumblies".  Tally wants nothing more then to turn 16 and be a Pretty.  She meets with another girl Shay who discovers they share a birthday and they quickly become friends.  Shay tells Tally the story of the legendary Smoke which is a settlement where people who refuse to conform to the restrictive ways of the Cities live off the land, without the aid of much technology and definitely do not get there appearances "perfected" through the extreme cosmetic surgery.  Shay heads off to find them and Tally is told she will not be allowed to become a pretty unless she goes after her friend and reveals the whereabouts of the Smokey settlement.  Tally is given an Ultra-Hover board (which is used very, very frequently in all of the books) as her mode of transportation and off she goes.  Tally finds the encampment and Shay and is taken in by the Smokey's.  After being initially appalled at the primitiveness of it all, she starts to fit in and starts falling for the leaders son David (even though he is visually repulsive to Tally after years of only seeing surgically perfected faces).  She also learns that part of the process of being "prettified" is the application of a small brain lesion in a specific part of the brain that makes the general populace fairy docile and compliant (bet every politician in America would love to get there hands on this technology).  Shay also was in love with David before Tally came and re-directed his attention, this does not make Shay very happy at all.  Tally decides instead of betraying the Smoky's to burn the location beacon she was supposed to activate, but instead of destroying the beacon, it actually activates it.
The encampment is raided and everybody but Tally and David are captured.  They go on a rescue mission and get everyone freed except for David's dad who has been killed, and Shay who has been prettified.  David's mother says she has an experimental cure, but will not use it on anyone without there express consent (yay for morals and ethics!)  Tally decides to be the one to try the cure and gives her written consent.  The book ends with Tally headed back to New Pretty to undergo the prettifying procedure complete with brain lesion to test the cure.
I enjoyed the premise of this book, and really appreciated that the author wrote a dystopian future where not everybody suffered horribly.  So many "future is bad" books I read make it sound like total control of a population results in horrific and painful enslavement of the masses, but I always wondered how people let it get that far for so long when they had nothing to lose.  In this book he shows how a mass of people can essentially become "voluntarily enslaved" (I like my quote marks today) and seemingly be as happy as can be.  I will continue with the other books later this week, the next one is my favorite.

Do you like this series?  Are you a fan of futuristic dystopian fiction, or do you prefer a more Star Trekian outlook?  How bad do you want a hover board?