Uglies, by Scott Westerfeld

Specifics
Uglies, by Scott Westerfeld
Published by Simon Pulse, 2011

Target Audience
Lexile level 77L
This book, because of the length and some of the themes and ideas, is for older students, middle schoolers.

Summary
This book is about a futuristic society where everyone gets plastic surgery when they turn sixteen. With that operation, the doctors also alter the person's mind, to make them "happy" and compliant. After that operation, everyone gets to move over to "Pretty Town" where everybody parties and has fun all day long. Right before the operation, Tally meets a girl who has the same birthday as her. They become friends, and the other girl, Shay, talks about running away. She had had friends that ran away from the city, but she had chickened out. Now, she wants to go and meet up with this guy who will take her to a place where there is no operation, but also no city, no technology. Tally gets forced to go and join that society, and she learns a lot of things about her city and the people who run it along the way. She also learns to see beauty in a totally different way than she ever thought she would.

Evaluation
This is a great story that children, I believe, will relate to so easily. Because our society is so permeated with the ideas and ideals of beauty, this book will teach students to view the idea of beauty in a way that they will actually think about it. This story shows a society that we could potentially turn into, so I believe this setting and story is realistic, in that world. The setting is that there was some sort of thing that infected all of the oil, and so regular cars stopped working. The rusty city has shut down, and is now just a ruin of what that city used to be. Reading this book, I did feel like I was in that time and place with Tally. The characters are realistic because there are those who question, and there are those who just follow along blindly.

Lesson
The main theme behind the lesson with this book will be the idea of beauty, and how it is just a social construct that everybody believes in. Anything can be beautiful to anybody, if they look at it the right way. The author's use of foreshadowing will be discussed after finishing the book. The use of metaphors and allegory will be discussed, because the author is making a statement about our society, and what we believe, and so we will talk about how things should change, and how we can maybe avoid this kind of future.