Book Awards II Challenge: The Uglies Trilogy

Titles: Uglies, Pretties, Specials
Author: Scott Westerfeld
Genre: YA/Science Fiction
Published: October 2005, October 2006, September 2007
Pages: 425, 370, 372
Rating: 8 / 10
Challenges: Book Awards II Challenge
Awards: Uglies was nominated for the 2006 BBYA (ALA's Best Books for Young Adults) list

*Possible Spoilers*
Synopsis of Uglies:

Tally is about to turn sixteen, and she can't wait. Not for her license - for turning pretty. In Tally's world, your sixteenth birthday brings an operation that turns you from a repellent ugly into a stunningly attractive pretty and catapults you into a high-tech paradise where your only job is to have a really great time. In just a few weeks Tally will be there.

But Tally's new friend Shay isn't sure she wants to be pretty. She'd rather risk life on the outside. When Shay runs away, Tally learns about a whole new side of the pretty world - and it isn't very pretty. The authorities offer Tally the worst choice she can imagine: find her friend and turn her in, or never turn pretty at all. The choice Tally makes changes her world forever.

Synopsis of Pretties:

Tally has finally become pretty. Now her looks are beyond perfect, her clothes are awesome, her boyfriend is totally hot, and she's completely popular. It's everything she's ever wanted.

But beneath all the fun - the nonstop parties, the high-tech luxury, the total freedom - is a nagging sense that something's wrong. Something important. Then a message from Tally's ugly past arrives. Reading it, Tally remembers what's wrong with pretty life, and the fun stops cold.

Now she has to choose between fighting to forget what she knows and fighting for her life - because the authorities don't intend to let anyone with this information survive.

Synopsis of Specials:

"Special Circumstances":
The words have sent chills down Tally's spine since her days as a repellent, rebellious ugly. Back then Specials were a sinister rumor - frighteningly beautiful, dangerously strong, breathtakingly fast. Ordinary pretties might live their whole lives without meeting a Special. But Tally's never been ordinary.

And now she's been turned into one of them: a superamped fighting machine, engineered to keep the uglies down and the pretties stupid.

The strength, the speed, and the clarity and focus of her thinking feel better than anything Tally can remember. Most of the time. One tiny corner of her heart still remembers something more.

Still, it's easy to tune that out - until Tally's offered a chance to stamp out the rebels of the New Smoke permanently. It all comes down to one last choice: listen to that tiny, faint heartbeat, or carry out the mission she's programmed to complete. Either way, Tally's world will never be the same.

My Review: I actually read this trilogy a couple months ago (I read Pretties during the last Read-a-thon, and Specials not long after), but haven't had a chance to review it since then. It's an interesting series, about a future world in which everyone has an operation that makes them attractive at age 16. Our protagonist, Tally, can't wait for the surgery. She's the last one in her group of friends to get the operation, and while she's waiting for her turn, she meets Shay, another "ugly" who wants to run away rather than become pretty. The series focuses on the theme of beauty, unsurprisingly, especially on the idea that it can come from the inside. I enjoyed the world Westerfeld created; everything sounds plausible, technology-wise, and the teenagers even have their own slang, which I believe adds to the realism. Some of the characters got on my nerves as the series went on; by the third book, I wanted to strangle Shay, even though I'm pretty sure I was supposed to feel for her because of the way she was - inadvertently, for the most part - betrayed by Tally. But on the whole, I enjoyed all three books and I'm sure other lovers of sci-fi would, too. There's a fourth book, Extras, that takes place well after this series. It sounds like an interesting extension of the world, and I'm curious to read it. The film rights to Uglies were purchased in 2006, but no release date has been set. I think this would make a pretty cool movie, if the special effects were done right.

Other Reviews:
If you have reviewed this book as well, leave me a message in the comments and I'll link to your review.

Book Awards II Challenge: Ella Minnow Pea

Title: Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters
Author: Mark Dunn
Genre: Fiction/Epistolary
Published: October 2002
Pages: 208
Rating: 10 / 10
Challenges: Book Awards II Challenge
Awards: According to Wikipedia, it was selected as Borders' Book of the Year. Yes, that is a stretch, but I'm behind on this challenge and I'm going with it. :)

Synopsis: From the back cover:

Ella Minnow Pea is a girl living happily on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina. Nollop was named after Nevin Nollop, author of the immortal phrase containing all the letters of the alphabet, "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog."

Now Ella finds herself acting to save her friends, family, and fellow citizens from the encroaching totalitarianism of the island's Council, which has banned the use of certain letters of the alphabet as they fall from a memorial statue of Nevin Nollop. As the letter progressively drop from the statue they also disappear from the novel. The result is both a hilarious and moving story of one girl's fight for freedom of expression and a linguistic tour de force sure to delight word lovers everywhere.

My Review: This was a very quick, entertaining read. I loved the play on words, even in the title: Ella Minnow Pea is written in an epistolary format, so it truly is "a novel in letters." I loved reading how the incredibly clever Nollopians dealt with the loss of their beloved letters by coming up with new spellings. "Hensephorth" is pretty recognizable; how about "lophlee" or "ephereething"? Throughout the ordeal, they manage to retain their sesquipedantic style of writing. The change within the book is gradual, so it's actually pretty easy to read, as crazy as it looks. All in all, it's a great little book. Will Shortz fans will especially enjoy it, I'm sure.

Other Reviews:
Fyrefly
Kim
If you have reviewed this book as well, leave me a message in the comments and I'll link to your review.

Book Awards II Challenge: The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Title: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Author: Junot Díaz
Genre: Fiction
Published: September 2007
Pages: 335
Rating: 7 / 10
Challenges: Book Awards II Challenge
Awards: Pulitzer Prize

Synopsis (from the back cover):
"Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd, a New Jersey romantic who dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukú - a curse that has haunted Oscar's family for generations, following them on their epic journey from the Dominican Republic to the United States and back again."

My Review: I really wanted to love this book. I had read so many great reviews, it had such a promising premise, and I really love discovering allusions. Unfortunately, something about it just didn't grab me. I loved the beginning, I loved the references (I really would like to see an annotated edition, with all of the allusions explained), I loved the Spanish slang (I even learned a few new words) and I especially loved Oscar. But the way the book jumped around and changed characters really confused me. It helped to explain the idea of fukú and how it affected Oscar, but I found it disconcerting. The narrator was an interesting choice - "The Watcher" is Oscar's college roommate and his sister's ex-boyfriend - but he's just so easily distracted. He wanders off on tangents and I just kept thinking, "Okay, and...?" The footnotes were also helpful, most of the time, and I liked them because they were so Terry Pratchett. But on the whole, I just didn't "get" the book. I had to force myself to read the middle part, and it ended up taking me a few months to get through the whole thing. And it's not even that long! There are some funny parts (Oscar's idea of a great pick up line: "If you were in my game I would give you eighteen charisma!"), though, and I am glad I read it. Essentially, it's a book about a nerdy kid who wants to be loved. Who hasn't felt that way at some point in their life?

Other Reviews:
Care
Nymeth

If you have reviewed this book as well, leave me a message in the comments and I'll link to your review.

The Sunday Salon - 10 August 2008

School starts tomorrow, and I think it's pretty safe to say I'm nervous. We had pre-planning all this week, and I've vacillated between excitedly hopeful and panicky nervousness. I feel completely unprepared for the first day, and it's driving my crazy. The veterans have all told me not to worry; the first day is usually a breeze, because you have to spend so much time with introductions, passing out books, and going over the handbook/syllabus that there's not time for anything else. That, and the students are all so tired after their two month vacation they tend to just zombie out on you. So, we'll see how it goes.

I did manage to get some reading done this week, which was nice:

I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You, by Ally Carter - When I did my student teaching at the middle school last year, one of my 7th graders LOVED this book. It's about a girl named Cammie who goes to school at the Gallagher Academy, which looks like a typical private school, but is actually an elite superspy training facility. The ending was surprisingly harsh, but in a good way - it was nice to have a unpredictable, anti-fairy-tale conclusion. I can't wait to pick up the sequel, Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy.

Side note: what's up with Powell's search feature? I couldn't find either of those books by title, author, or publisher - I had to go to Amazon, get the ISBN, and search for them that way. Weird.

Anyway, I also read ttyl, by Lauren Myracle (which is also impossible to find on the Powell's site, which is making me regret linking the books at all). The neat thing about this series is that it's written entirely in chatspeak. It's a series of IM conversations between three best friends. The best part (for me) is that it takes place in Atlanta, so anytime they mentioned a street or business (Junkman's Daughter, Churchill Grounds), I got excited and knew exactly what they were talking about. There is a downside to this, though. One of the subplots involves a bunch of teen drivers protesting the speed limit on I-285. According to the book, it's 65 mph. I wish! It's actually 55 mph, which makes it even more ridiculous. But that was my only major quibble with the book. I don't know if I'll read the others in the series, because the IM style and constant (true to life) errors gave me a headache, but it was pretty good and definitely different.

I'm currently reading:

Peeps, by Scott Westerfield - because Breaking Dawn just wasn't teen-vampire-angsty enough for me.

The Last Temptation of Christ, by Nikos Kazantzakis - for the 1% Well-Read Challenge.

The Hours, by Michael Cunningham - for the Book Award Winners II Challenge.

Some fun book links:

Locus Online and Tor both have coverage of the Hugo Award winners - YAY for Neil Gaiman, Michael Chabon, and Dr. Who!

Kafka apparently collected a bunch of porn. Not exactly what we learned about him when I was in school, but okay.

Livejournal user absinthetic has created this amazing Wonderland expedition kit for his girlfriend. I have no words.

Happy reading!

Weekly Geeks #9: Challenges

This is actually my first WG post! It's a good thing Dewey gave us two weeks for it, because it took me a while to get organized.

This week’s theme is Challenges.

1. If you participate in any challenges, get organized! Update your lists, post about any you haven’t mentioned, add links of reviews to your lists if you do that, go to the challenge blog if there is one and post there, etc.

2. If you don’t participate in any challenges, then join one! There’s a good selection of possibilities over on my right hand sidebar (scroll down) where I list those I participate in. There’s also A Novel Challenge, a blog that keeps track of all sorts of reading challenges.

3. Towards the end of the week, write a wrap-up post about getting your challenges organized OR if you’re joining your first challenge, post about that any time during the week. Once you have your post up, come back and sign Mr Linky with the link to the specific post, not just to your blog.

Here are the challenges I am currently participating in:

1% Well-Read Challenge - I finished my second book for this challenge (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) on the last day of June; the review is here.
Book Awards II Challenge - This one doesn't actually start until August, but I got a head start by updating my list; I found a bunch of books I wanted to read for the challenge at a library book sale.

A Midsummer Night's Challenge - This one ended last month. I finished both the books I read for it (Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Pratchett's Lords and Ladies) and wrote reviews for them (posted here). It feels really good to have one challenge completed and out of the way!

July Book Blowout - This challenge is a bit of a catch-all for the month of July. I like it because the goal is just to read books; you don't actually have to post a review. I've already finished three YA novels (Just Ella and two BSC books), and I'm currently reading Stitch 'N Bitch and The Yiddish Policemen's Union.

Life Books Challenge - I just joined this challenge this week! I've already chosen and posted about my Life Books; now I just need to visit other participants and choose two books to read for the challenge.

For all of these, I linked the books I'm using either to BookCrossing or Powell's Books. I also made a sort of "challenge template" so that all of my challenge main pages look pretty much the same - after I read a book, I strike it out and post a link to the review of it, along with the date I completed it (except for the JBB Challenge - I'm not reviewing all of those, although I may change my mind and do it later, or on the BookCrossing page for the book).

Happy reading!

Book Awards II Challenge

Click here for the main page
Rules:
*Read 10 award winners from August 1, 2008 through June 1, 2009.
*You must have at least FIVE different awards in your ten titles.
*Overlaps with other challenges are permitted.
*You don't have to post your choices right away, and your list can change at any time.
*'Award winners' is loosely defined; make the challenge fit your needs, keeping in mind Rule #2.
*Have fun reading!

My list:
1. The Uglies Trilogy - Scott Westerfeld (2006 BBYA nomination) 22 December 2008
2. Ella Minnow Pea - Mark Dunn (2002 Borders Book of the Year) 23 November 2008
3. Neuromancer - William Gibson (1984 Nebula Award for Best Novel, 1985 Hugo Award for Best Novel)
4. The Tale of Despereaux - Kate DiCamillo (Newbery Medal)
5. The Graveyard Book - Neil Gaiman (Newbery Medal)
6. Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card (1986 Hugo Award)
7. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Díaz (2008 Pulitzer Prize) 2 November 2008
8. The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents - Terry Pratchett (2001 Carnegie Medal)
9. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (2003 Costa/Whitbread)
10. An Abundance of Katherines - John Green (2007 Printz Honor Book)

5 down, 5 to go!