Uglies

Well, I finished Uglies and flew right through Pretties. I'm dying to jump into Specials but we don't own it yet and I'm not buying any more books until we move. We had to make our bookcases look nice and neat and that meant packing up all the books that were lying sideways and wedged into every free inch of space.

The premise of the series is terrific - a world where everyone has plastic surgery when they turn sixteen. Everyone is pretty - but they're also pretty vapid. There's definitely something sinister going on. But what I liked even more than the premise was the language. Scott Westerfeld manages to take a couple of words and give them new layers of meaning. Uglies who are tricky are especially clever at bucking the system. If you're feeling bubbly you're feeling excited and fully alive. But he also used a verb-as-adjective construction that felt immediately natural and easy to fall into. That leap was a little nervous-making. Snow would be totally pretty-making! This stunt is going to be famous-making! I loved it.

Now we just have to sell our house so I can read Specials, and then Peeps after that. It's a totally different kind of vampire book by the same author and it's been highly recommended by one of my favorite booksellers - Becca Wren at Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Cleveland.

PS The Fabricationist writes in with a link to a very cool post on Scott Westerfeld's blog about naming the characters in the series. The link doesn't show as a link in the comments, so here it is for non-cut-and-paste-linking purposes. Alan and I always have really interesting discussions about the names of his characters and it was fun to see how another author approaches the same thing - very similarly, as it turns out.