"Tally peered into the mirror all day, noting every flaw, every deformity. Her thin lips pursed with unhappiness. Her hair grew even frizzier because she kept running her hands through it in frustration. A trio of zits exploded across her forehead, as if marking the days since her sixteenth birthday. Her watery, too-small eyes glared back at her, full of anger"(120).
So this book is apparently set in the future when they’ve invented a procedure to make everyone “pretty”. The city then separates the “pretties” from the”uglies”. They do it at their 16th birthday, and this is apparently to make everyone equal. They frequently mention how horrible it was when people didn’t have the operation and everyone was ugly. They say that it was horrible how people judged others on their appearances, and the main character (Tally) didn’t even believe that people used to discriminate based on skin color. So that sounds okay, right? Everyone’s attractive, and there’s no longer any teasing or anything about how you look, plus the operation doesn’t even hurt; they just say that your new skin feels like a bad sunburn for a while. But on Tally’s last summer before turning 16, she meets a friend who doesn’t want the surgery. She says that the “pretties” are all the same, and they aren’t any fun. About a week before both of their birthdays (they have the same birthday), Shay asks Tally to run away with her to live in a secret society where people didn’t have to have the surgery, and where they didn’t have to follow the strict rules of the city. Tally refuses (she was looking forward to the surgery), and Shay leaves. So now it’s Tally’s birthday, and the “Special Circumstances” people tell her that she has to help bring in the secret society and her friend Shay in order to turn pretty.
This quote is Tally back in her dorm wanting to be pretty already, but debating whether to break her promise to Shay not to tell anyone where she went. Everyone else in the dormitory knows about the “Special Circumstances”, and they all treat her like a freak.
What I don’t understand is how Tally, or anyone in this kind of a society, can ever really care about how they look, since it won’t matter past their 16th birthday anyway. They’ll all be the same (-ish), so their society wouldn’t put hardly any pressure on them to look good.
So far, this is a really good book; it makes you think. All I care about now is what's going to happen next!
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1 comment:
I have never read this book before, but from your quote it sounds really interesting! It does seem weird to not live in a society where everyone is judged by their "prettiness" rather than the color of their skin. I find it really interesting to read about what people think the future will be like. I think I will be reading this book this summer! Thanks for the great post.
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