Recently I have read a book series called Uglies. It was a very good series which I think everyone should be required to read.

The basic plot of the story is this: in the future, after humans have destroyed the world, a new system is set up. This system states that every person under 16 is “ugly”. And once you turn 16, you get an operation to turn yourself “pretty”. In this society, being pretty means looking the same as everyone else, with big eyes, full lips, high cheekbones, and small noses. The secret of the operation is that when they are doing this surgery, they put a lesion in your brain to make you think that everything is fun and games, and that life is a big party. This makes sure that no one steps out of line and questions the authorities, and that no one starts a war. This method is fine with most people because they still don’t know that they are being brainwashed. Even though everyone gets everything they want, some people still rebel.

The most important thing in Tally Youngblood’s life is to become pretty and leave her ugly past behind her. Her dream almost comes true, until she becomes friends with one of the rebels. A few days before their 16th birthday, Tally’s friend runs away to a place called Smoke to get away from the operation. Tally is forced by the authorities, or as they call them in this book, Specials, to follow and betray her friend. When Tally finally gets to Smoke, she finds out the truth about the operation, and then she has to make a choice: to either betray Smoke and her newfound friends, or to stay and forget about the world she has always known. Tally goes through betrayal, friendship, romance, escape, and finally Tally gets her wish to become “pretty”.

As it says on the front of the book, “In a world of extreme beauty, anyone normal is ugly”. It is not that normal people are really ugly; it is just that there are people around them who are more beautiful. Beauty does not stay the same over the years; it changes from generation to generation. Long ago, it was beautiful to be fat, because the only way for people to do that was if they were rich, and that was hard to be back then. Now everyone has the power for becoming fat, so now beauty is when you are skinny. Beauty it seems has to always be hard to achieve, or else there would be no one to compete with. People now have to know that beauty changes, so you should not do things like starve yourself to become beautiful, because people in the future will not always think the celebrities that are “beautiful” now are beautiful then. An example from the book is when Tally and her friends are looking through a fashion magazine left over from our time and they are laughing at our bad taste in beauty, and how they think the people now are crazy because we went as far as starving ourselves to become beautiful. One of the main lessons in this book is that beauty is not really how you look or how much you weigh: it depends on whether you act like yourself or not, and if you do what is really in your heart.

Another point in this book is that you have to be your own person. You cannot let other people control what you think, either by persuasion or by putting a lesion in your brain. Some people fake who they are just to become popular, but then no one likes you for who you are because no one knows the real you. At first, Tally is fine with people changing her through surgery, but then Tally is very against the surgery because she found out that true beauty is not what is outside of you, but what is inside your heart. Helen Keller put it very well when she said, “The best and most beautiful thing in life cannot be seen or ever touched, they must be felt within the heart”. The beautiful things in life cannot be found on the face or anywhere on the earth. The most beautiful thing has to be found within one’s heart. What you do and what you think is what makes you beautiful. Everyone’s heart is different. It would be unnatural for all of us to think the same things like they do in the book, so being your own person is very important.

This book was very good and it taught a lot of important lessons about life and what true beauty really is. Not only does it teach necessary things about life, but the characters are very likeable and the plot is so intense that it is hard to put it down. This is a book that I think everyone should be required to read because it teaches that no one should be controlled by others and no one should hide who they truly are.