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Uglies Paperback – May 3, 2011

by Scott Westerfeld (Author)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 6,005 ratings
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Soon to be a major motion picture streaming on Netflix!

The first installment of Scott Westerfeld’s New York Times bestselling and award-winning Uglies series—a global phenomenon that started the dystopian trend.

Tally is about to turn sixteen, and she can’t wait. In just a few weeks she’ll have the operation that will turn her from a repellent ugly into a stunningly attractive pretty. And as a pretty, she’ll be catapulted into a high-tech paradise where her only job is to have fun.

But Tally’s new friend Shay isn’t sure she wants to become a pretty. When Shay runs away, Tally learns about a whole new side of the pretty world—and it isn’t very pretty. The authorities offer Tally a choice: find her friend and turn her in, or never turn pretty at all. Tally’s choice will change her world forever.
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Previous page
  1. Reading age
    11 - 13 years, from customers
  2. Book 1 of 4
    Uglies
  3. Print length
    432 pages
  4. Language
    English
  5. Grade level
    7 - 9
  6. Lexile measure
    770L
  7. Dimensions
    5.5 x 1.2 x 8.25 inches
  8. Publication date
    May 3, 2011
  9. ISBN-10
    1442419814
  10. ISBN-13
    978-1442419810
  11. See all details
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Popular Highlights in this book
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Previous page
  1. Nature, at least, didn’t need an operation to be beautiful. It just was.
    Highlighted by 2,887 Kindle readers
  2. The flowers were so beautiful, so delicate and unthreatening, but they choked everything around them.
    Highlighted by 2,139 Kindle readers
  3. Perhaps the logical conclusion of everyone looking the same was everyone thinking the same.
    Highlighted by 1,493 Kindle readers
  4. Nature, at least, didn’t need an operation to be beautiful. It just was.
    Highlighted by 1,366 Kindle readers
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Scott Westerfeld is the author of the Leviathan series, the first book of which was the winner of the 2010 Locus Award for Best Young Adult Fiction. His other novels include the New York Times bestseller Afterworlds, the worldwide bestselling Uglies series, The Last Days, Peeps, So Yesterday, and the Midnighters trilogy. Visit him at ScottWesterfeld.com or follow him on Twitter at @ScottWesterfeld.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers; Reissue edition (May 3, 2011)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 432 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1442419814
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1442419810
  • Reading age ‏ : ‎ 11 - 13 years, from customers
  • Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 770L
  • Grade level ‏ : ‎ 7 - 9
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11.8 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1.2 x 8.25 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 6,005 ratings

About the author

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Scott Westerfeld

Scott Westerfeld

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Scott Westerfeld's teen novels include the Uglies series, the Leviathan, Zeroes, and Midnighters trilogies, and Afterworlds. His graphic novel, Spill Zone, will be continued in SPILL ZONE 2: THE BROKEN VOW, which comes out July 10, 2018.

Scott was born in Texas, and alternates summers between Sydney, Australia, and New York City.

His next prose novel, IMPOSTORS, set in the world of Uglies, comes out September 11, 2018.

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
6,005 global ratings
The OG of Dystopian YA
5 Stars
The OG of Dystopian YA
Between cups of coffee and sleeping littlies, I decided to dive back into the world of Tally Youngblood and the Uglies Series this past weekend. The Uglies by Scott Westerfeld is the OG of Dystopian YA. I first read the series back high school over ten years ago and it felt like catching up with an old friend today.In the futuristic world of Uglies, Tally Youngblood is waiting out the last few months before she turns sixteen. At sixteen, you get an operation that turns you beautiful. But before Tally gets her operation, she meets Shay, who shows her a world outside of New Pretty Town and it makes Tally question everything.As a mother of three, I hardly get a chance to sit down and read, but I flew through the first book of this series. I couldn’t put it down. Hoverboarding and Uglies’ tricks kept me on the edge of my seat and the book never misses a beat. The world building is incredible. I can see the Smoke and the Rusty Ruins. I want to ride a hoverboard through the river.The futuristic world still hold up ten years later and it’s ideas on society and beauty still resonates. In our world of social, media and Snapchat filters, it easy to relate to the characters who have only known a world where everyone you see is pretty, where everyone’s lives look, oh so pretty. But like Tally, we will come to find that “all that glitters does not hovery.”Tally Youngblood is one of my favorite characters. She is fearless. Like Katniss or Tris, she is the face of a rebellion, even if she starts off in a different position to begin with. She’s also your typical 15 year old teenager who is obsessed with looks and vanity. But she grows on you if you give her a chance! The other characters are hit-and-miss. Shay, Tally’s new best friend, is a follower who becomes an annoying bubblehead. And the love interest might fall in love too unbelievably fast for me.Favorite Quote : “Nature, at least, didn’t need an operation to be beautiful. It just was.”5 out of 5. It’s a fast-paced, easy read with the best world building, and characters who you grow to love. For Readers 12 & Up!
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Top reviews from the United States

Zornitsa Ivanova Ivanova
5.0 out of 5 stars 4.5/5
Reviewed in the United States on February 25, 2024
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deliciously good distopia, read it in one sitting. what a great start of a series, can't wait for the rest.
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Quinton
5.0 out of 5 stars This cover looks so much better in person than it does through pictures!
Reviewed in the United States on March 27, 2024
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This is my favorite book series ever to exist, but sadly I lost my original copy of Uglies. I wanted to reread it before the Uglies movie premiered on Netflix. I was skeptical about this cover because I loved the original cover so much, but once I received it I will say it feels well made, and even has ridges on the silver dots for all you texture loving folks! Great buy!
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Patrick Shepherd
4.0 out of 5 stars Being Pretty isn't All Good
Reviewed in the United States on June 23, 2008
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Mr. Westerfeld has established a very good reputation as a writer of imaginative and engrossing YA science fiction, and this book is a prime example of how he has earned that reputation.

The palette for this book is a society that has declared that everyone must be pretty, and achieves that goal through a set of medical operations at age sixteen, so that no one will end up with the misfortune of having less than stellar looks, thereby eliminating many of the conflicts associated with people who look `different'. Those in the `tween' years of 12 to 15 are, of course, comparatively ugly, and are typically known by that moniker, as opposed to the `littles', the `middle pretties' - those in middle age, and the `crumblies' - still pretty, but old. Pretties get to party all night and all day, with practically whatever they want delivered on demand through the convenient service outlet in their rooms. The uglies, of course feeling somewhat left out, often try to trick their minding sensors and crash the pretty parties, with some more successful than others.

Tally Youngblood is one such ugly, an inventive, bright fifteen year old, only a few weeks away from her pretty operation. Her `tricks' to enter the pretty society across the river and her friendship with another ugly, Shay, eventually lead to her being noticed and unwillingly being recruited by the Specials, a shadowy group that seems to actually be in control of this society, to help find and destroy a small group of renegades from this utopia who live in the wilds. Her travels in pursuit of this goal eventually lead her far from the city and just as far from the mental viewpoint it encapsulates.

Tally is well drawn as a young girl with perfectly understandable goals and emotions. The problems she faces have immediate and forceful impact on not just her worldview, but on the reader's. The challenges are not small molehills of little larger relevance, but in fact have great import in her development while at the same time allowing the reader to see and think about the problems of such a society and what the alternatives to it are. All of this is done without any preaching or overt philosophizing, in very clear prose.

I did have a few reservations about just how the economy of this society actually worked, as only hints were given about just what the middle pretties did, how things were manufactured, or just what technology was really behind some of the gadgets. But these were pretty small quibbles compared to the presentation of Tally's character and those around her, both those sympathetic to her and those wishing to control her.

This is only the first book of this trilogy (actually now four books), so the end of this book leaves a lot of threads hanging, but it does manage to conclude the initial scenario quite well, and shows us a Tally who is a far cry from the Tally at the beginning of the book. It perhaps is not a great sf book, but it's a whole lot better than some of the `adult' material being published today, as it is quite accessible by people who don't have Ph. D. in rocket science, while still being both quite inventive and with quite a bit of meat hiding behind it's story of one girl's growth.

---Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)
12 people found this helpful
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5.0 out of 5 stars great!
Reviewed in the United States on April 13, 2024
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Great as a teen. Great a second time as an adult.
Original dystopian concept. D d d d d d
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FoxysMom
3.0 out of 5 stars Strong concept, weak story.
Reviewed in the United States on February 21, 2014
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In this futuristic world, there are Uglies and there are Pretties. Main character, Tally is an Ugly, who can't wait for her sixteenth birthday, that magical birthday when all newly 16-year-olds get to undergo plastic surgery to become a Pretty. Once Pretty, she gets to go to the New Prettytown, where a Pretty's only job is to have fun. Everything looks like its going to go according to Tally's plan, until her friend Shay, decides to run away rather than become pretty...And Tally is given the task of tracking her down and bring her back into civilization.

I didn't love this book from start to finish, but some parts were definitely more lovable than others. At first the story was hard to get into: Even though the story is told by Tally, who is almost sixteen, her voice seemed to belong to someone much younger than a teenager approaching adulthood. In the beginning it was hard to relate to someone so childlike, but when Tally started meeting with the Agents of Special Circumstance, her innocence worked in the book's favor taking a bad situation and making it so much more disturbing.

As Tally goes off on her quest to find Shay, it eventually gets easy to get lost in the adventure of traveling to a secret society by hoverboard. Once she finds the group, you can't help but feel a little bad for her: Society had groomed her to desire artificial beauty and now all she wants it to be pretty; now she's left facing a moral dilemma about how far she's willing to go to get what she wants and who is she willing to hurt...And just as you're beginning to find substance in the story, Scott Westerfeld had to go and cheapen it with a teenage-love triangle. I don't know why so many YA authors want rely on romance to make their stories stick, and I can understand how Tally and David would work as a plot device... Someone needed to make Tally see herself beyond how the government wants her to perceive herself. But why the third person heartbreak? It didn't advance the story and as a subplot, it went no where.

I think the morals Scott Westerfeld was trying to express got across clearly, but I think it could have been done better. I understood why he chose simple names for the two classes. Everyone wants to be Pretty, no one wants to be Ugly. But then I read the names of cities: New Prettytown, Uglyville, Crumblytown, Rusty Ruin, and thought, "It's like you're not even trying." Then there were things that weren't ever addressed, things that you'd expect to be addressed in a science fiction novel taking place in a futuristic society: Like why parents aren't involved in their children's lives, what kind of government is in place-->If Special Circumstances are in charge of keeping the peace, who gave them that job? And I was able to guess almost immediately from Shay and Tally's conversations about New Pretty behavior, that more than plastic surgery was going on on the operating table, although, that might be because I'm older than the target audience...(Who else noticed the shameless Smash Mouth shout-out?)

In some ways, Tally seemed to mature with the story, in others she regressed. The more pressures she had to deal with, the smarter she became, making decisions cautiously, instead of impulsively. On the other hand, there were numerous time where she could have and should have told the truth, and each time choosing to invent foolish, elaborate lies, rather than asking for help. Which make her a bit of an oxymoron in the end; she wants to do the right thing by her friends, but doesn't care how many people get hurt by her lies.

This book was certainly based on a thought provoking premise, but the story fell short of the concept.
9 people found this helpful
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booklover
5.0 out of 5 stars Finally! A new great series to love
Reviewed in the United States on July 2, 2023
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It's so hard to find books that appeal to my interests - books with a great plot, characterization, and my personal preference - some good fantastical elements. I absolutely love this series. Fascinating setting and concept; it makes you think deeper into some of our societal flaws. It really highlights the crazy flawed thinking into externals that so many of us have. I loved that while there were many elements that clearly are fantasy, the characters didn't escape challenging situations in unrealistic ways, by somehow sprouting wings or the like. There were clear cut "rules" that the book laid out and there was no crazy magic somehow occurring to save the protagonists.
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Top reviews from other countries

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Melsbells
5.0 out of 5 stars Great read
Reviewed in Germany on December 29, 2023
Verified Purchase
This is the second time I’m reading it with students in class. It’s a rather easy read, but there are so many themes to talk about. Definitely a recommendation!
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Yess A
4.0 out of 5 stars Me gusto.
Reviewed in Mexico on February 23, 2018
Verified Purchase
Me parece un buen inicio, sin duda me atrapo y no dudo que continuare con los siguientes libros. Es bastante ligero y dinámico.
El libro llego un poquito sucio de la portada pero nada problemático.
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Tes
5.0 out of 5 stars Must read
Reviewed in Australia on May 5, 2021
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Amazing series and amazing world. Absolutely a MUST READ for any dystopian fiction lover. The Smoke Lives! ☆ ☆ ☆
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Luis Phelipe
5.0 out of 5 stars Pode comprar sim!
Reviewed in Brazil on October 2, 2016
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Esse livro é um daqueles que a gente não quer parar de ler; muita aventura e reflexão sobre padrões sociais!
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Amber Faganello
5.0 out of 5 stars A great read aloud.
Reviewed in Canada on December 21, 2013
Verified Purchase
Sixth grade students love dystopian fiction and this is one of their favourites. I plan to read it aloud to my class next year. I love reading a book I know they will be Into and one that has books after it so they can continue on their own. I do think that since kids judge what they will read based on the cover they would be smart to redo this to make it a little more engaging. No pre-teen would pick this up based on the cover....
2 people found this helpful
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