Jessica
This is a book that I read and adored when I was 13, and rereading it now, my opinion didn't change very much.
You can probably read the blurb for yourself, but it encompasses a lot of themes that I find really interesting - there's a dystopian, futuristic society, there's a bunch of rebellious youths struggling to create a new kind of society, and there's creepy stuff around brain surgery changing the way people think, making them placid and happy all the time. The first time I read the book, the first few chapters seemed kind of boring, but they establish the setting of the book efficiently and it's not like they're hard to read, so you can race through them and get to the good bit soon enough.
The novel can certainly seem a bit heavy-handed - the words “ugly” and “pretty” are used so many times that they can start to seem like they're not even real words, and there are quite a few tangents (whether spouted by a character in dialogue, or as a monologue from narrator Tally's own head) about the absurdity of judging people by their looks, how this leads to societal problems like anorexia or discrimination against ugly people or just everyone feeling really miserable in their own skins all the time. This is all true but I think the book overdoes its denunciations a bit - no one consciously thinks this obsession with appearance is a good thing, after all.
Overall though, the plot is good, the setting is fascinating, and towards the end of this book and, I think, in the other two of the trilogy, there's some stuff that comes up to make you pause and think. It's not a five-star book for the reasons I've outlined, but I love it deeply nonetheless.
This is a book that I read and adored when I was 13, and rereading it now, my opinion didn't change very much.
You can probably read the blurb for yourself, but it encompasses a lot of themes that I find really interesting - there's a dystopian, futuristic society, there's a bunch of rebellious youths struggling to create a new kind of society, and there's creepy stuff around brain surgery changing the way people think, making them placid and happy all the time. The first time I read the book, the first few chapters seemed kind of boring, but they establish the setting of the book efficiently and it's not like they're hard to read, so you can race through them and get to the good bit soon enough.
The novel can certainly seem a bit heavy-handed - the words “ugly” and “pretty” are used so many times that they can start to seem like they're not even real words, and there are quite a few tangents (whether spouted by a character in dialogue, or as a monologue from narrator Tally's own head) about the absurdity of judging people by their looks, how this leads to societal problems like anorexia or discrimination against ugly people or just everyone feeling really miserable in their own skins all the time. This is all true but I think the book overdoes its denunciations a bit - no one consciously thinks this obsession with appearance is a good thing, after all.
Overall though, the plot is good, the setting is fascinating, and towards the end of this book and, I think, in the other two of the trilogy, there's some stuff that comes up to make you pause and think. It's not a five-star book for the reasons I've outlined, but I love it deeply nonetheless.