EVERY CHILD ENACTS the story of the Fall, when their own body, once clothed in innocence, becomes a source of shame. The age at which this happens has been falling steadily, just as the age at which children show signs of eating disorders is rising. There are novels galore about anorexia, but none has tackled the heart of the matter, a child’s dawning perception, in an age of cosmetic surgery, of themselves as ugly.

Uglies deserves three cheers for taking the premise that in a world of extreme beauty, anyone normal is ugly, and turning it into one of the most original children’s novels, and SF thrillers, I’ve read for years. Tally, the heroine, can’t wait to turn 16 and become a Pretty, like her best friend Peris.

Sneaking from Uglyville into New Pretty Town, where life is one long party for a population surgically remade into supermodel perfection, Tally meets another Ugly girl named Shay who teaches her how to ride her hoverboard into the Rusty Ruins — all that’s left of our own culture. It seems like a game until her new friend starts to tell her a few details about how “they grind and stretch your bones to the right shape, peel off your face and rub all your skin away, and stick in plastic cheekbones so you look like everybody else”. The standard trope of the girl who feels she is ugly is modulated into a question: Why is it that after you become a Pretty, you feel anything but “bubbly”? At first Tally, desperate to become a Pretty, doesn’t care. She refuses to follow Shay on the secret route to where a few Uglies live in a primitive camp. However, she has come to the attention of the sinister organisation known as Special Circumstances. They blackmail her into following the clues left behind that only she can decipher, giving her a homing device disguised as a silver heart.

Tally makes the journey alone, only to discover the hideous truth about how Pretties come to be so compliant and cheerful: it isn’t just their appearance that is surgically altered. At first repelled by the sight of people who are not only “ugly” but old, she comes to see that this is normal. The Pretties were created to “make everybody happy because everybody looks the same”; they have discovered how to use solar power and live an apparently ideal life in which there are “no more controversies, no disagreements, no people demanding change. Just masses of smiling Pretties, and a few people left to run things.”

Like Brave New World, this is a seeming Utopia resting on ruthless suppression of individual freedom; Scott Westerfeld’s vision, portrayed through the dawning consciousness of his heroine, is less literary and more filmic than Huxley’s, but thought through with pleasing logic and debated with a sharp wit. The power of beauty to sway judgment, gain approval and command authority is particularly well described, although Tally herself is just a bit too vague as a character; I’d have liked to see more of the self-consciousness Huxley gave his protagonist, not least because it is this lonely torment of self-loathing that propels real adolescents into individuality.

There is enough plot and futuristic gadgets for Uglies to appeal to boys, too, but this is one for girls of 11+ to devour at a sitting, not least because it ends on a terrific cliffhanger which the sequel, Pretties, will presumably resolve. The longing for fairytale beauty has never looked so sinister, or been more brilliantly satirised.

What’s more...

SNOW WHITE
by Josephine Pool and Angela Barrett
Red Fox, £5.99
Hauntingly lovely version of this fairytale. For 4+

THE BIG UGLY MONSTER AND THE LITTLE STONE RABBIT
by Chris Wormell
Red Fox, £5.99
Wise, funny, heartbreaking tale of a lonely monster so ugly that he has to create a stone friend. For 4+

BEAUTY
by Robin McKinley
Corgi, £5.99
Beauty and the Beast, retold by a plain but captivating heroine. For 10+

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