Imagine a world where everyone is beautiful. Everyone is the perfect weight, wears amazing clothes, and has everything they need. This is the world that Westerfeld creates in his Uglies series.
Tally is an ugly waiting for her 16th birthday when she will receive plastic surgery and move across the river to Prettytown. She makes friends with fellow ugly Shay, who has connections with a rebel group who thinks the surgery is evil. When Shay disappears to find her outlaw friends, Tally is given an ultimatum: find the rebel camp and turn them in or spend the rest of her life as an ugly. In the following books, there are rescues, escapes, a love triangle, and betrayal, as well as some really fabulous chase scenes.
The series was originally a trilogy, but Westerfeld added the superfluous and utterly disappointing Extras at the end for reasons I don't understand. (If you value your time, please don't read this book). The first two and a half books are utterly wonderful, though. Westerfeld, no stranger to writing trilogies, has an unfortunate habit of running out of gas in the last book. Toward the end, Specials follows this sad trend.
Read Uglies and Pretties. If you feel so inclined, read Specials, too, though it's not as good. But Extras is, sadly, a horrible book.
This book is excellent, and so is the sequel, but the third and fourth books suck crap. Oh, and by the way.... I read "The Shwua Was Here" by Neal Shusterman, and I liked the beginning, but the end was too depressing, in a way. Rating on a scale of one to ten... 8.5. Good, but not outstanding.
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