review: pretties and uglies

It's a universal truth that a woman in possession of, shall we say, plebian tastes in pop culture is always in want of new trashy teen novels to consume. I still have been unable to exorcise the creeping crud that is the Gossip Girl series (and the new very entertaining spinoff "The It Girl"), but I finally stopped reading "The A List" after there was a VERY long paragraph on how nobody who wore size 8 jeans could ever be considered hot. !!!!! Why that series is still even in print is beyond me.

Anyway, I am a sucker for a) dystopian fiction b) teenagers c) Cory Doctorow, and when he recommended the first two Scott Westerfield novels in the Pretties series ("Pretties" and "Uglies") I snapped them up on Amazon.  

These books are short, with large print, and they are very addictive, so expect to speed through them. I read both in a few hours, but I am a crazy speed reader. They're set in a future world where plastic surgery is used to alter people's looks upon adolescence, where they go from "uglies" (non-surgically enhanced) to "pretties" (symmetrical facial features, big eyes, etc.). There's a lot of tidbits culled from current theories of beauty as protection (e.g. we want to take care of cute things with big eyes). The main character is an reluctant rebel who moves between the various worlds. Part of the fun of the book is figuring out how the world really functions, so I'm loathe to give away spoilers.

If you like cheesy teen scifi, you'll like this, but it's a bit heavy-handed and you're not going to get any major revelations. I will take this opportunity to pimp  my all time favorite teen novel, Feed.  It deals with consumerism and marketing more than beauty, but it does it in a much more frightening way. Pretties and Uglies are fun reads, but they don't make you question your own life the way the best dystopic fiction does.