etc.

So, when I closed my computer at 7pm on Friday evening, I had every intention of opening it back up again on Saturday morning to take advantage of the momentum I’d built on getting the course together, but as Saturday morning rolled in, the pain in my wrists and the fluffy weariness in my brain dictated otherwise. A break is in order, I thought to myself. So I grabbed this book of my night table, where it has kept me company for half an hour every night, and set to finishing it. And it’s just the sort of book that is better when read in a single flourish, I wasn’t at all doing it justice with the brief snatches of attention I was giving it.

Tally Youngblood is a 15-year old girl who lives in a bizarre, dystopic world where from birth to age 16, citizens are bred to believe they are ugly. On their 16th birthdays, the “uglies” all undergo an operation that transforms them into The Accepted Standard of Beauty, making them “pretties” and moving them across the river to New Pretty Town, where everyday is a party and everyone is always happy and the fountains flow with honey (OK, I made that last part up). So, anyway, Tally is a little rebel who pulls highly-illegal midnight trips to New Pretty Town to mock the New Pretties (while she secretly can’t wait to be one) and snatch glimpses of her recently-prettied best friend Peris, when, during one of these truant escapades, she meets and befriends Shay, her equal in truancy, who shares none of Tally’s fascination with prettydom, and who eventually runs away to escape the operation. As a result of a series of rather unfortunate events, Tally follows Shay and ends up in The Smoke, a postapocalyptic junk heap, home to a colony of runaway uglies, where she meets a boy and learns the truth about her government, her city, pretties, and most importantly, the operation. It’s a fabulous book, really quite mature for a YA novel, that left me eager for my turn to come up on the library holds list for the sequel (I’m #89 on the list, it will be a couple of weeks). If you haven’t already figured it out, I commend this book to you. Highly.