Reading Circle-December
I feel like I’m playing catch-up from the last month, but such is life. Here is a recap on the books I read in December!
Uglies by Scott Westerfeld-★★★-I remember reading this when I was a Freshman and LOVING it. I decided to revisit it and wasn’t as impressed as I was when I was younger.
This book takes place in a world where everyone gets an operation at the age of 16 to become “pretty.” Everyone who is pretty is equal. Tally Youngblood is waiting for her operation when her friend, Shay, runs away. She is given an ultimatum by the leaders of the community: find Shay or never turn pretty. Tally goes after Shay and discovers some pretty crazy secrets about her community and the “pretty” operation on her adventure.
I liked the premise of this story and felt like this was a new take on Utopian/Dystopian worlds. I didn’t connect very well with the characters and felt them to be a little too shallow. I also found myself wanted MORE details of the community and the leaders and worlds-and it was hard for me to imagine the setting without those details.
That being said, I still enjoyed the read. I can see why so many students like it. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to my students who were into this kind of reading.
I just feel “eh” about this. It was okay, but not life changing.
I enjoyed the premise and setting of this book a lot, as well as how real the friendships, with all of their issues and tender moments, were. I think that the main character actually suffering consequences of her actions is such a bold move as an author and I am glad Lockhart made it. It makes the characters more real to the reader.
While I think the concept was an interesting approach to high school labels and stigmas, I REALLY struggled with the tense in which the book was written in. Not many books are written in shifting present tense and it was hard to read in it. Also, there were a lot of characters to keep track of and I felt like they weren’t fully realized because of that. They seemed more shallow, typical and cliche. The book ended rather abruptly and didn’t really resolve any of the issues that the author spent the whole book building up to-do the feuding sisters make up? Does the girl with the eating disorder get help after the dance? What happens to the home schooled girl who gets pulled out of school? Do the mean girl really learn her lesson?
This book does a good job raising questions about the high school experience and how peer pressure and labels can change everything in an instant but the lack of resolution distracts from it.
