Pretties

Title: Pretties
Author: Scott Westerfeld
Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Tally Youngblood, now pretty, is having the time of her life - or so she thinks. She's beautiful, healthy, and completely spoiled. Encouraged to party and "surge" (surgically alter herself) and be generally vapid, Tally gets twinges that she's not happy like she's supposed to be. Then she gets a message from her old, ugly self. She knows what's wrong. She and her clique, the "Crims," attempt to keep their heads clear - to keep "bubbly" instead of "pretty-headed" and to escape from the clutches of the city authorities known as Special Circumstances.

Pretties was a good follow-up to Uglies, though not quite as gripping. True, it was still fast-paced and when I picked it up I didn't want to put it down, but I didn't have the driving urge to pick it back up once I'd put it down that I had when I read Uglies. That could have been because Tally was already pretty and was constantly fighting the pretty-headed fog surgically altered into her brain, and that fog certainly comes across in the prose of the book.

In all, I liked the book, and want to know what happens in Specials and then in Extras.