Uglies (2011)
Uglies is a 2011 juvenile fiction book written by Scott Westerfeld.
Tally Youngblood counts down to her sixteenth birthday and the surgery every citizen receives then: an operation that turns a plain ugly into a flawless pretty and grants a place in the party-lit towers across the river. Then she meets Shay, who has no intention of being made beautiful, and who runs. Faced with a choice between betraying her new friend and never turning pretty at all, Tally learns what the perfect world asks of the people inside it. Scott Westerfeld helped set off the modern wave of young adult dystopias with a fast, unsettling story about beauty used as control.
Quick answers
What is Uglies about?
Tally Youngblood counts down to her sixteenth birthday and the surgery every citizen receives then: an operation that turns a plain ugly into a flawless pretty and grants a place in the party-lit towers across the river. Then she meets Shay, who has no intention of being made beautiful, and who runs. Faced with a choice between betraying her new friend and never turning pretty at all, Tally learns what the perfect world asks of the people inside it. Scott Westerfeld helped set off the modern wave of young adult dystopias with a fast, unsettling story about beauty used as control.
When was Uglies published?
Uglies was published on 3 May 2011.
Who made Uglies?
Uglies was written by Scott Westerfeld.
Similar books
Uglies in our writing
- Companion guide: YA Dystopias: The Hunger Games and the Decade the Arena Ruled
A few thoughts on Uglies
The engine here, a society that manufactures conformity and calls it happiness, runs through the Black Mirror episode Nosedive, where social approval becomes a visible score everyone chases. For the same teenage rebellion against a shiny system, the Hunger Games and Divergent films are the natural next step, each built on a young woman refusing the future her world assigned her.
Societies that decide what beautiful is supposed to look like
Tally has never questioned the surgery waiting for her until Shay makes her look at what it actually costs, and that same quiet coercion shows up across Black Mirror's takes on appearance and status, The Giver's enforced sameness, Matched's approved partners and careers, Delirium's cure for love, and The Selection's beauty-pageant path to power.
The book series that made the jump to theaters
Uglies got its own film treatment the same way a whole shelf of 2010s YA did. If Tally's world of Pretties and Specials hooked you on the page, Divergent, The Giver, The 5th Wave, and Chaos Walking all deliver the same mix of a controlled world and a teenager figuring out how to break from it, just with a different cast and skyline each time.
Two rebels who trust each other more than the system
Tally and Shay choose each other over what the city expects, the same loyalty that carries Legend's June and Day through a Republic built to keep them apart, Insurgent's Tris and Four through a faction war they don't fully believe in, Glass Sword's Mare through a rebellion she can't survive alone, and Katniss through the arena of The Hunger Games and its aftermath.