SARA’S FACE (13+)
by Melvyn Burgess
Andersen Press, £9.99; 264pp

ONE OF THE MOST horrifying aspects of modern parenthood is the speed with which radical ideas about beauty are accepted as the norm among children. Once children recoiled from the Ugly Sisters cutting off their heels to fit into Cinderella’s shoes.

Now plastic surgery is the stuff of children’s viewing; the programme Ten Years Younger is a particular favourite. Beautiful, healthy eight-year-olds pinch their stomachs and burst into tears if there is more than an inch of fat; it is increasingly common for girls to get nose jobs or breast implants for their 16th birthdays.

This is satirised by two very different writers. Scott Westerfield’s Pretties is the sequel to Uglies, a stunning fantasy set in a world in which every child and teenager is “ugly” until having plastic surgery at 16 to turn them into a “Pretty”, enjoying a life of parties, clothes and fun.

Tally, the heroine, was blackmailed by the secret police into following her best friend into the wild where the rebel “Smokies” live, rejecting both the cosmetic surgery that turns them into images of perfect beauty, and the brain lesions inflicted to produce a passive populace. But Tally fell in love with a rebel boy, unwittingly revealing the location of the camp and being forced to have the operation. Uglies has spread like wildfire through secondary schools, and Pretties carries on the story with Tally, now beautiful but brain-damaged, speaking the slang (a clever update of contemporary modes), getting implants and doing increasingly daring things with her new boyfriend to command the attention of other Pretties.

Bit by bit, the effects of the operation are resisted, and vague memories return; then, in a wonderful scene, Tally and her Pretty boyfriend, equally brain-damaged, are smuggled two pills. It is hoped that these will repair her brain — but true love means that they split the dose, with fatal results for one.

Westerfield has created a gripping thriller about a dystopia founded on ideas of beauty, with all the gadgets, urban planning, moral dilemmas and medical disasters of superior science fiction. The third part, Specials, is due in the autumn.

Melvyn Burgess’s books are both fascinating and repulsive. Capable of wild originality in novels such as My Life as a Bitch, he also makes gross errors of taste, such as Doing It, a graphic description of boys’ sexual adventures perhaps inappropriate in a children’s book. Sara’s Face addresses the psychological distortions of body dysmorphia.

Obsessed by a pop star, Jonathon Heat, Sara thinks that her breasts are the wrong shape, and that she is such “a mess underneath her clothes” that she requires plastic surgery. She does not want to listen when her boyfriend tells her about the blood and pain involved. A tough cookie, she has already wreaked revenge on some boys who were harassing her — and then she makes herself famous by calling in a local television crew to film their antics. But then her love of role-playing and appetite for celebrity and self-harm collide in a sinister set-up. As Heat warns her: “It’s possible to turn yourself into a monster, Sara. I’m living proof of it.”

Who, precisely, emerges wearing a “living mask” of Sara’s face at the end? Those who familiar with Michael Jackson’s story will be able to hazard a good guess. It doesn’t quite work as a thriller because of a weak ending but for those who want their cautionary tales with a bit of grit this is worth reading.

WHAT'S MORE...

SIZE 12 IS NOT FAT (11+)
by Meg Cabot
Pan, £6.99
Would you kill to be thin?

SNOW WHITE (4+)
by Josephine Poole and Angela Barrett
Red Fox, £5.99
Exquisite illustrations.

ELLA’S BIG CHANCE (5+)
by Shirley Hughes
Red Fox, £5.99
Lovely Jazz Age version of the Cinderella story.

FIVE CHILDREN AND IT (9+)
by E. Nesbit
HarperCollins, £4.99
The perils of wishing for beauty.

BRAVE NEW WORLD (13+)
by Aldous Huxley
Vintage, £7.99
The original dystopia.

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist