Author: Scott Westerfeld
Publisher: Audible
Rating: WARTY!
Audio book spouted pathetically by Carine Montbertrand.
Amateur. This is the one word which stood out in my mind as I began listening to this audio book. If juvenile married tedium, their spawn would be this. It didn't help that this young adult novel was so dryly narrated by a woman who sounded like she might be grandmother to one of the characters.
I don't believe a YA novel has to be narrated by a YA person - although in most cases it would probably help. I do believe the person has to sound the part, especially if it's a first person narration. Forget about hiring actors, For gods' sakes just get someone who can read decently and who doesn't sound like they got on the wrong subway train. Please. I'll wait. This narrator was beyond awful, and the voices she used for the characters were so sad as to be laughable. The one she used for character Shay was worse than nails on a chalkboard. It was so sickly that it was more like two-day old vomit on a chalkboard.
But amateur. How amateurish the plot and the writing truly are is what glared at me upon first listen. Yeah, we get that pretty equals big eyes and ugly equals squinty. You don't have to keep on relentlessly smashing us over the head with it every other sentence. Yeah, I get that Scott Westerfeld has mastered 'telling'. I eagerly await any vestige of evidence suggestive that he might, one day, seek to explore 'showing'.
Tally Youngblood (really? young blood? Really?) is an ugly. Of course this claim is rendered nonsensical by the image on the cover which once again goes to prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that the cover artist never reads the book. Or in this case, even the book title. If Tally is ugly, then how angelic, exactly, are the pretties - and why would they not make anyone who viewed them spontaneously comatose due to excessive sugar content?
Yes, Tally is ugly - so we're expected to swallow. Tally lives in Ugly Town. Ugly town. Her best friend is Peris. Peris is pretty. Peris lives in Pretty Town. Pretty town. And Ugly Town. Must never be mentioned. In the same sentence. They are on OPPOSITE SIDES of the river - get it? Must I paint a sign? Please, pay attention to the massive head-pounding this author is delivering desperately to your noggin. Sheesh. What's wrong with you. You're not...un-pretty are you? Cos that would be just ugly.
Romeo and Juliet much, Scott? The only difference between these two people is three months - in three months, when she's sixteen, Tally, (she's ugly, remember?) who lives in a boarding school for uglies in Ugly Town, will be able to get herself prettified, and move to Pretty Town and again be best friends with Peris (he's pretty, remember?). Seriously? This sad amateur divide is your entire plot?
Who was it that decided the change takes place at 16 and why? Why not at puberty? Why not at birth? Why not at twenty-one? No reason. How did this bizarre system even come to be the standard? No reason. Why would anyone in their right mind put up with this? No reason. How does the economy even function if everyone in Pretty Town is quite literally idling their time away and everyone in Ugliville is too young for employment? No explanation. If all the adults are in Prettiville, then who delivers the ugly babies? How are they even conceived if no one bumps ugly? Who maintains law and order? Who takes care of and supervises the children? Why do the park patrol people not resent the fact that they alone have to work whilst no one else ever does? Do the Pretties even pee and poop? Just curious. Isn't that an ugly thing? Why is it tolerated?
From whence cometh the energy budget in these two towns? Everything is hover. How that works is again unexplained. It's like the author just slammed in every pre-adolescent idea he'd ever had, and went with it. But the energy expenditure must be massive, and there is no explanation for it.
Being prettified means losing brain cells. Apparently they use brain cells to prettify you. How else can we explain that once prettified, people become cavemen-like, dumb-ass, jock frat-boy party animals - and that's all? I actually wrote that before I got to the last disk which contained NOTHING BUT a discussion of brain lesions. Oh, and guess what? Pretties get to sleep late! Yes indeed they do! They. Get. To. Sleep. Late! How pretty of them! Because getting up early is UGLY. Everyone knows that. Sheesh. Did the author write this when he was eight years old and it's just now getting published?
I can't believe that he parlayed this absurd trash into four volumes. If an unknown writer had brought this to a Big Five Publishing Ho, they would've been run out of town on a rail, and rightly so. This just goes to show that it's not what you write, but which door you can wedge your foot into that accounts for who gets published and who doesn't in Big Publishing™ world. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the intrinsic merit or otherwise of the written word. OTOH, if people are truly dumb enough to buy this and come back for more, why not milk them for all that their wallets can bear?
Tally can't wait out those short three months because she's a complete moron. She simply has to sneak over to Pretty Town (as she and Peris used to in the ugly old days) and try to visit with him. This entire trip serves no purpose other than to show how bone-headedly and dedicatedly dumb-ass-to-the-core Tally truly is. Le stupide is strong with this one. I was sure this would explain a lot of what was to be found in the oncoming pages (or in my case, disks) and I was not wrong! 'Tally' is so obviously a referent to how few functional brain cells this chick has.
So no, I can't recommend this. Indeed, I actively dis-recommend it as bone-headedly and dedicatedly stupid to the core. I found myself skipping track after track and then disk after disk because it was badly written and/or badly read, and in the end I gave up. Life is far too short to waste on ugly fiction, and this novel is pretty ugly.
