Before I get into any analysis of the book I'm going to give the trigger warning I wouldn't have expected to be needed. There's a bit of content that could be very upsetting and even dangerous for people who've struggled with self-harm to read. I didn't see it coming so I'll warn you here. In the chapter titled "Ritual" Tally and another person see a group of people cutting themselves to try to get an adrenaline high. (The context of that, and who's doing it and why, will make sense as you get there.) If you want to just skip to the next chapter without reading that part, here's what happens right after that: All the people gathered to cut do so. Zane stopped breathing briefly, and Tally insisted on taking him to the hospital. All the Cutters saw them as they left. Once they got to the hospital, Zane intentionally injured his hand so they'd have something to treat.

Now. The book! It annoyed the heck out of me, but it was supposed to be kind of boring and senseless. Scott Westerfield does a great job of immersing his readers in the world of Pretties. They use idiotic slang all the time and are very empty-minded, and he really manages to explore that and make us feel that. I think he also did a good job of exploring how they could grasp a desire to escape their pretty-mindedness. It was a struggle for all the characters to break through the haze of their vane world. The author didn't make the decision easy or automatic. They had to keep fighting. So he didn't make it easy for us to read. It was frustrating to watch them "relapse".

I think a lot of people disliked this book because he rarely gave us what we were rooting for. Junk went wrong and characters made stupid, senseless choices. It's very brave to screw up your own story. So I admire and appreciate that.

I'm glad that Tally is trying to be a better person. I mean, she fails. A LOT. But she has learned some lessons about being honest with people. She's making a lot of hard choices and trying to do the right thing. So we are seeing character growth, even though her mind has been turned Pretty and things aren't going the way we want them to.

Three stars ("liked it") because it annoyed the heck out of me at times but it was for good reasons, and it didn't always. I won't say it's amazing writing, but it's pretty good. (Basically I want to save my four and five, which is why this gets a middling score.)

[update]
Oh, one more thing I forgot to mention.
I'm really sick of the dystopian novel trope of a teenage girl resistant to some drug. Cassia Reyes in Matched fought through two pills and refused to take the third. Tris Prior in Divergent is resistant to many serums. Even Jonas in The Giver stopped talking his pills. And here we have Tally Youngblood beating the brain lesions through sheer willpower. (At least Katniss Everdeen didn't fight the effects of any drugs.) I know Matched and Divergent were written after Pretties. If anything they're all borrowing from The Giver. I'm just so tired of that shared feature in all these series -_- We can have a compelling story without any characters rejecting the control drugs or medical procedures are supposed to put on them! There can be something else that they fight! I guess I'm complaining of the unoriginality of a genre at this point. ( )

I was right about the worldbuilding expanding in future novels. I like how complex everything is getting, and how Tally is coming to understand that neither side is 100% right. I liked Tally and Zane's relationship, but the love triangle is a little meh. I will give it grace seeing how these books were published in 2005, long before certain famous books over did the love triangle.

There was some language used that I also wasn't a fan of. I will give it a partial pass, again because of when the novel was written, but since I'm reading original editions, I'm curious if the language was changed in future editions. ( )

Dystopia

A good continuation of the trilogy begun in [b:Uglies|24770|Uglies (Uglies, #1)|Scott Westerfeld|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255574770s/24770.jpg|2895388]. I thought the pacing was a bit too slow even for me; I'm not sure how a real YA would react. (Audiobook note: The narrator's habit of having almost all the characters stre-e-e-e-etch out the first syllable of a sentence's first word is really beginning to annoy me. I'll almost certainly listen to the 3rd book, [b:Specials|968|The Da Vinci Code (Robert Langdon, #2)|Dan Brown|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255581720s/968.jpg|2982101], but I'm not certain I'll be able to endure the narration all the way through. I might have to resort to print.] ( )

Well... can't say I didn't expect this after Uglies, but still anything like pretty-world is giving me shivers. It's like disgust slightly clouded by rationalization. It's something I can't really like no matter the reasons. And besides, level of selfdoubting in this book is through the roof for me. ( )