In every family there is a book recommender- the person who has read everything and is pretty much responsible for recommending books to everyone else- especially on holidays. In my family, that’s me. I read a lot and tend to relate everything I talk about to everyone else through books (or news, but always something I read).

Last year I was sitting at the computer with my cousin’s son (he’s 17) and we were talking music, books and adolescence. I was talking about Catcher in the Rye and Red Hot Chili Peppers, he was talking about some death metal band with this amazing opera thing going on, and a book he had read that he said nailed what it’s like to feel like you belong outside of everyone around you.

It’s called Uglies, and he’s right- it’s good.

The book is the first in a series that I think was originally a trilogy and then added a fourth. The basic plot of the book is that the main character is a teenager in a future, post-apocalyptic society who lives on the Ugly side of town- the same side where everyone else under 16 lives. They are all called Uglies.

It is generally understood that the way you are naturally born is ugly and that modern science, among other miracles under the knife, has the ability to make you pretty, which opens the door to your adult life and, in a sense, makes you “more equal,” to borrow a phrase from Animal Farm. At 16, every citizen goes in for a surgery where they are surgically “upgraded” to become a Pretty, at which point they move to the Pretty island where everyone else lives in dorms and they party it up.
The next three books in the series are called Pretties, Specials, and Extras, and while I have not read the rest of the series (yet…), I assume each one tackles the ethics and issues of human engineering moving up the scale.

The book tackles, through the mind and experience of the narrator, what happens when someone doesn’t quite buy the idea that being Pretty is better. Our narrator is a troublemaker and has already had the love of her life turn 16, become a Pretty, and move to the island. She is heartbroken and acting up, but isn’t quite sure that she wants to become a Pretty at all.

Soon she meets another who promises that over the river and through the woods, where they travel on cool, futuristic hoverboards that use magnets in the ground for tracks, there is a secret society of others who have felt and still feel the same way. The night before she is to undergo her own surgery she steals off on her hoverboard, following a coded note from her friend who has already disappeared. I’ve only given you the first quarter of the book or so.

The rest is about what she finds, what she goes through and how she deals with new friends, old authorities and her own sense of right and wrong and how things should be. A wonderful book that tackles the issues of image with skill and throws in some awesome science fiction to boot.

Photo Credit: Philip Weiss (via Flickr under CCL)