I'm stubborn. I am. If I wasn't so stubborn I wouldn't stick with good books with bad narrators.
I have very good memories--happy, happy--memories of first reading Scott Westerfeld's Uglies. When Rose Brock tells you that you should read a book, you should read it. It will be fabulous.
My memories of the audio book won't be so happy. I didn't mind her Tally voice. But almost every other single voice she does is incredibly annoying, obnoxious, irritating. Her Shay voice is the absolute worst character voice I've ever heard for any audio book.
I believe the book has been done with other narrators. That would be a GREAT thing. Every book deserves a good audio book adaptation.
My original original review:
Set three to four hundred years in the future, Uglies, a dystopia, focuses on a global community of pretty people. Tally Youngblood introduces readers to this picture-perfect community where appearances are not a matter of one's genes but a matter of extensive plastic surgeries planned by the Community of Morphological Standards. Tally and Shay are best friends awaiting their sixteenth birthdays and their surgeries after which they'll leave Uglyville behind and join the New Pretties. But Shay doubts that the "Pretty Committee" is as concerned with equality and justice as it appears, suspecting that ulterior motives may lay behind the surface. Days before her sixteenth birthday, Shay runs away leaving a cryptic message for her friend to find the way to Smoke, the rebel community of "ugly" outsiders. When the authorities discover Shay's disappearance, Tally is asked to make the hardest decision of her life: betray Shay and the rebel community to the authorities or face living life ugly.
Uglies is a fast-paced novel taking a typical YA topic--self esteem, conformity, and the perception of beauty--and treating it in a new and ultimately satisfying way by speculating about where current values of beauty and perfection might lead us as a society if taken to the extreme. By setting Uglies in the future instead of a contemporary high school, Westerfeld is able to provide reflection and commentary on a serious topic in a new and original way.
© 2018 Becky Laney of Becky's Book Reviews
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