"She waited on the hill, exhausted but unable to sleep, wondering if she could really do what Dr. Cable wanted. The pendant around her neck had also survived the ordeal. Tally doubted a little water would have ruined the device, but she wouldn't know until she reached the Smoke and activated it.
She hoped for a moment that the pendant wouldn't work. Maybe one of the bumps along the way had broken its little eye-reader and it would never send its message back to Dr. Cable. But that was hardly worth hoping for. Without the pendant, Tally was stuck out here in the wild forever. Ugly for life.
Her only way home was to betray her friend."(186).
I think this kind of foreshadows what Tally will find when she arrives at “the Smoke”. When she first learns of the place where people run to when they don’t want to be made pretty, she thinks it’ll be a horrible, filthy, uncivilized place filled with hideous people, but now her determination to believe that is waning, probably because of how close she has come to actually getting there. I think when she finally gets to the Smoke she’ll find that the people there are a lot more aware of themselves than the people from the city where she has grown up. People from the city are portrayed as lazy, semi-educated people who take their advanced technology for granted and only care about their looks and how to have a good time. This excerpt makes me think that Tally will, at first, think that people in the Smoke are too vulgar and rude maybe, but later she’ll get used to everyone being “ugly” (which just means normal by our standards) and the technology not being as advanced as she’s used to, and she’ll realize that she likes these people a lot more than she thought she would. Because the machinery of the past (our present) is a bit less hidden away and magical than that at her city, and just more crude and obvious, I think Tally will really appreciate it more because she can actually understand how it works. It’s just my guess that when she grows fond of everyone at the Smoke she will have a huge internal battle between the side of her that wants to become pretty and the side of her that doesn’t want to give up her friends. Right now, I can’t really make even an educated guess about which side of her will win, but if I had to guess it would be that she stays in the Smoke just because then she would be a “good guy” and there would be a happy ending.
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1 comment:
This book sounds very interesting. Instead of beauty they want the opposite. I would really like to read this book. It kind of sounds like a book that I read a while ago. You should read A Great And Terrible Beauty if you havent already. I think you would really like, especially if you like what you're reading now.
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