Review: Uglies by Scott Westerfeld

This is a pretty popular book. People seem to talk about it a lot. So, I decided to see if it was any good. Honestly, not so much.

Just to give a sort of a rundown, this book is about Tally Youngblood, who lives in a (future) world in which every person, upon reaching the age of sixteen, has to undergo a cosmetic procedure which makes them "pretty". So "uglies" can't wait to finally turn 16, so they can become beautiful like everybody else and join the New Pretty World where life is an endless party. All is fine and well, until Tally meets a girl named Shay, who, get this, doesn't want to have the surgery and would rather remain herself. Very controversial. Right before their "shared" birthday, Shay tells Tally she is running away to live in a secret community outside of town called the Smoke, and Tally is recruited by special forces to find the community. She is faced with the choice of either being ugly forever or betraying her friend.

I kind of formed a sort of love-hate relationship with this one. More of a like-hate relationship, but still.

On one hand, I think that the whole universe in which the story is set is quite interesting. I find it believable. People are very preoccupied with their looks, especially young ones. We tend to judge each other based solely on how someone looks, and these differences between people had had catastrophic consequences in the past. So this sort of a dystopian future felt real and believable to me. Whenever someone branded themselves or others as an "ugly" and truly believed it, I got this weird, unpleasant feeling. So I feel that that whole aspect was well written and imagined.

But, on the other hand I hated the character in these books. Detested them really.

I didn't feel for them at all. They could've been plummeting to their deaths, and I just thought meh. I couldn't care less. They had no depth to them whatsoever. They were just dull, plain and one-dimensional. I honestly can't point at one characteristic of the heroine and say "there's something that defines her" because there isn't any. At all. Except maybe her shallowness, but that's more due to the society she lives in than anything else. Her character just doesn't offer anything. For me, it was completely unrelatable. And when she met David, her "love", she really started getting on my nerves. One moment they didn't even acknowledge each other, but the next they were in love. I could've gone past it, if I just felt it, but I didn't. I was reading about their shared moments and again I was just like meh. Oh, and David? Even worse than Tally, even more plain and uninteresting. Obviously, the secondary characters are non-existent. They are there, for the sake of the story, but they don't bring anything to it. 

This book was a letdown for me, because I feel like people love it so much, and I just didn't. It was okay, but there were things (as stated above) that really irritated me. I am not even sure I want to keep reading these series. I might get back to it, when I am bored, but the first book didn't really make me want to keep reading. Which is too bad, because there were things I thought were good.