On January 29th, the Breakfast Book Club met to discuss Uglies by Scott Westerfeld. Uglies is a Young Adult dystopian novel where 16 year olds undergo surgery to turn them into Pretties. Tally, our protagonist, has been waiting her whole life to be turned into a Pretty and move to New Pretty Town where all she'll have to worry about are which parties she wants to go to. When Tally meets Shay, she is introduced to a mindset she has not come across before. Shay does not think New Pretty Town is all it's cracked up to be and she does not want to change the way she looks. When Shay runs away before the operation, Tally is told she must find and turn her friend in or she will remain an Ugly forever.
Some of the questions we had after reading this book were: what does it mean to be a friend? What does it mean when someone betrays another? What does selflessness look like? We also questioned whether we would think more like Tally or more like Shay if we lived in their society. Would we want the operation? Or would we want to flee a society that wanted to change us?
Uglies is the first in the series and we were all very interested to see what happens next.
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