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Part I: Turning Pretty

Chapters 1–5

Summary: Chapter 1: New Pretty Town

Tally Youngblood is a fifteen-year-old girl living in Uglyville. Her friend Peris has just had cosmetic surgery to become a “Pretty,” a person with physically enhanced features. The surgery is required for every sixteen-year-old in town. Once a person becomes a “Pretty,” they move to Pretty Town. “Uglies,” or people who have not had the surgery, are not allowed in Pretty Town. Tally misses Peris and has decided to sneak into Pretty Town to talk to him. A river divides the two towns, and an old bridge crosses over it. Tally crosses the bridge and comes upon a parade of revelers. She hides while they pass. She puts on a discarded pig mask she finds in the street and heads into town. 

Summary: Chapter 2: Best Friends Forever

Peris lives in Garbo Mansion, where all the new Pretties live. There is a white tie event. People notice that Tally is dressed too casually and begin pursuing her, but Tally escapes into an elevator, where she finds Peris. Peris is angry at Tally for putting herself at risk and makes her promise not to come back before her operation. Tally notices Peris no longer has the scar they made together on their hands, and that he isn’t excited to see her. Peris tells her the only way to escape is to bungee jump from the tower. On her way down, Tally pulls a fire alarm to distract her pursuers, but it only draws more attention. Authorities arrive on the scene, and Tally narrowly escapes to the bushes to hide. 

Summary: Chapter 3: Shay

Tally hides in the bushes. She hears a safety warden coming to patrol the grounds. The safety warden is a “Middle Pretty,” a middle-aged person who has a second operation to look safe and trustworthy. Tally, programmed to trust Middle Pretties, answers “I’m sorry,” but another girl answers, who is also hiding in the bushes. It’s another Ugly, Shay. Shay has also come into Pretty Town on a secret expedition to see her friends. The two girls escape town using a makeshift ladder Tally made to cross the old bridge. Shay is using a hoverboard, an airborne device to fly in the air. Tally says she doesn’t have much experience using one but is interested in learning. 

Summary: Chapter 4: Wipe Out

Shay teaches Tally how to use the hoverboard. She explains that the board “reads” the rider through a belly sensor, and adapts to the rider’s movements. The girls begin to enjoy each other’s company, and commiserate over losing friends to Pretty Town—they never seem to return or be interested in maintaining ties with Uglies once they cross over. The two decide that they will never abandon each other after their operations. They also discover that they have the same birthday, which means that their operations will be performed on the same day. Shay doesn’t seem as excited as Tally about getting the surgery. The girls talk about why the new Pretties never come back. Tally says it’s because no one wants to be around an ugly person. 

Summary: Chapter 5: Facing the Future

Tally wants to play with a morphos game that allows users to experiment with their features to see what they’d look like after their operation. Shay is not interested; she says society teaches people they’re ugly. After some persuasion, Shay agrees to create a morphos. The game takes a person’s face and duplicates one side and creates a mirror image of it to create a symmetrical face. Tally asks Shay which side of her face she thinks is better, explaining that she prefers Shay’s left side. Shay gets irritated when Tally starts to alter her features using the game, saying she wishes Tally would just accept her as she is. Shay says her face is fine as it is, and that she would rather go hoverboarding. 

Analysis: Chapters 1–5

Uglies opens with a surprising description of beauty by comparing the summer sky, something most people find beautiful and calming, with cat vomit. Tally Youngblood, the protagonist of the novel, has an interesting way of viewing things including this sky. She admits that this same scene, during any other summer would be beautiful, but today things are different: Her friend Peris has just left her. He has just had the city’s mandatory surgery at age sixteen to make himself a “Pretty,” a cosmetically enhanced human that promises him a lifetime of happiness and emotional security. Tally has to wait a few more months before her surgery. Tally’s view of the sunset sets up an important theme in the novel: Beauty changes with perception. This theme will continue throughout the novel as the characters shift their perceptions of where true beauty lies, if anywhere.

Tally’s sadness also sets up another major theme in the novel—friendship. Tally is devastated to lose her friend Peris. She describes the event as painful, unfair, and rotten. Tally counts the months and days until they’ll be reunited again—three months and two days. Their friendship is so close they’ve even given themselves matching scars on their hands as symbols of their bond. The idea that surgery can separate two friends is the first time something seems off. Tally wonders how something as simple as a physical change could separate friends, and why can’t she see Peris, even after his surgery?

This question is partly answered when Tally sneaks into Pretty Town, where Peris now lives with the other kids who’ve had the surgery. When Tally runs into Peris in the elevator, everything she’s been taught about how beauty affects a viewer comes alive: His newly symmetrical features, big eyes, and full lips overwhelm her senses. Peris’s new look causes him to appear young, vulnerable, and healthy, a look that Tally knows evolution prefers. Peris’s face confirms everything she’s been taught in school: Beauty is an evolutionarily fixed ideal.

But Peris is not as excited to see Tally. Tally notices his demeanor is more subdued, and that he’s eager to get her to leave. Peris tells her she shouldn’t be there, and that he wants her to promise not to get into any more trouble which would jeopardize her surgery. His plea seems self-motivated, to ensure their eventual reunion, but also Peris seems to be disgusted with Tally’s behavior. Perhaps most shockingly, his scar has been removed. The removal of the scar seems symbolic of the larger problem between them: An essential bond between them of understanding and trust seems to be lost between them as well.

The theme of loyalty in friendship continues when Tally meets Shay. Shay and Tally have the same birthday, so they’re on the same timeline for getting the surgery. They both have friends in Pretty Town that they’ve come incognito to see. They’re both forlorn about losing friends, friends they’ve been loyal to perhaps to a fault, and both confused about why their friends never seem to want to see them after they’ve had the surgery. Shay and Tally bond over their grief and sorrow as they face the idea that their friends’ loyalty perhaps isn’t as strong as they believed.

Shay also is inspired by Tally’s rebelliousness. She thinks Tally bungee-jumped from the Pretty Tower of her own accord, though in reality, Peris forced Tally to jump. Tally is not as much of a daredevil as Shay thinks. This will continue to be important to their friendship—their bond over risk-taking and how it inspires each of them to change over the course of the novel.

Finally, the girls do disagree on one very important matter—whether the surgeries are ethical or not. Through their arguments over the morpho game, it becomes clear where the lines are drawn between the girls in terms of their views of independent thinking. Ironically, they both believe what society tells them—that they’re “ugly,” but for different reasons. Tally believes that society is simply repeating what is biologically and objectively true—that certain irregular physical features are ugly, whether people believe that or not. Shay believes that society’s ideas about beauty, objectively proven or not, are untrue because beauty is never a fixed idea. It’s something that changes over time, as she says when she points out how Cleopatra wasn’t beautiful back in her day. Shay is clearly more of an independent thinker than Tally, who is more invested in finding a way to feel better about herself.

Next section Chapters 6–10

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