Pretties

What's inside (8 sections)

1. Life in New Pretty Town
2. The letter and the pills
3. Escape to the wild
4. The New Smoke and the cure dilemma
5. Shay turn and Zane cost
6. Taken and transformed
7. Key takeaways
8. FAQ

I read Uglies fast and went straight into Pretties because the ending left Tally with a terrible choice. Pretties is book two in the Uglies series. It came out in 2005 from Simon Pulse, around 370 pages. Tally Youngblood, who turned pretty at the end of book one to infiltrate the system, now lives in New Pretty Town with no memory of her mission. She remembers parties, not promises.

That setup hooked me. What if the rebellion worked and you forgot it. Tally wakes up bubbly, obsessed with clothes, champagne, and tricks. Her boyfriend Zane is handsome and kind. Her friend Shay is fun and restless. Underneath, a letter she wrote to herself waits to be found.

Life in New Pretty Town

New Pretty Town is built for pleasure. Pretties live in mansions, take hot air balloons to parties, wear outfits that change color, and play tricks that often end with someone in a fountain. Tally loves it. She surfs a balloon with Shay, steals a swimsuit from a boutique for a dare, drinks too much pink champagne. The prose gets floaty on purpose. Sentences get short. Everyone says bubbly a lot. It is fun until you notice how empty it feels.

Tally and Zane are the popular couple. Zane remembers a little more than others. He gets headaches and flashes of the Smoke, the rebel settlement from book one. He tells Tally they were supposed to do something important. She laughs it off because thinking hurts when you are pretty. The operation that made them pretty also made them calm and compliant. It trims sharp thoughts.

Shay is different. In Uglies she was Tally friend who ran to the Smoke. Now she is pretty too, but angrier underneath. She remembers David, the Smoke boy, in dreams. She picks fights at parties. She wants to go out to the wild. Tally follows because Shay is magnetic and because Zane encourages it.

The tricks escalate. They crash a formal dinner by arriving in trash bags. They steal a helicopter for a midnight ride. Special Circumstances, the scary branch that polices pretties, watches and smiles. Dr. Cable, the woman with cruel gray eyes, tells Tally she is special. Tally takes it as a compliment. As a reader I felt sick, because praise from Cable never means safety.

The letter and the pills

Halfway through a party, Tally finds a letter in her bag in her own handwriting. It says remember the Smoke, take the pills, stay Rusty. With it are two pills. One is for her. One is for Zane. The pills are supposed to cure the pretty brain lesions that make pretties docile.

Tally hides the letter. She does not want to take a strange pill. Being pretty feels good. Why risk headaches and sadness. Zane, who has worse headaches and nosebleeds, wants to try. He takes his pill first. He shakes, sweats, throws up, then wakes up clearer. He starts asking questions about power use, about why pretties never work, about where food comes from.

Tally still waits. She likes Zane clear, but she fears becoming ugly inside. Shay mocks her for stalling. Shay takes risks without pills, sneaking out past the city edge. The tension between the three feels like college friends where one gets sober and the others keep drinking. Love stays, but ease goes.

When Tally finally takes her pill, Westerfeld writes it well. It is not a magic wake up. She vomits, sleeps for a day, wakes with a pounding head and old memories flooding back. David face. The Smoke burning. Her betrayal when she threw a tracker in book one. Her promise to Shay mother to test a cure. She cries for hours. Zane holds her hand and says welcome back, even though he is still weak.

I liked that the cure is partial and costly. Tally gets sharper, but pretty reflexes remain. She still notices clothes first. She still wants to be liked. Zane gets clearer but his body pays. His headaches grow. His hands shake. The book says freedom has a physical price, not just a moral one.

Escape to the wild

Remembering means they must leave. Special Circumstances knows. Dr. Cable invites Tally for tea and shows her pictures of the Smoke burning, of Croy and other rebels captured. She offers Tally a job as a Special. Tally pretends to agree while planning escape.

The escape uses the tricks they learned partying. Balloon surfing becomes a real skill for crossing gaps. Stealing a car becomes stealing a hovercar. Shay leads them out at night with packs, water purifiers, and a map Zane memorized. They head for the Smoke ruins, hoping to find David and the remaining rebels.

The wild chapters are my favorite. The city kids who never walked more than a mile must hike, filter water, eat bland bars. Tally, who was an expert tracker as an ugly, remembers how to read signs. She finds old trails, avoids wolf packs that are actually engineered wolf dogs, builds a shelter from crash foam. Shay complains the whole time and keeps walking. Zane struggles most. His body, damaged by the cure and by early treatment, falters on hills. Tally carries his pack without comment.

They reach the Smoke and find ash. The settlement was burned. No David. A message scratched on metal says they went to the sea. Tally feels guilt like a weight. She led Specials there in book one. Even though she came back to help, the ground is still black.

They follow river routes toward the Rusty Ruins, the collapsed cities full of rusted cars and towers. This is where the book slows in a good way. The kids explore a ruined mall, find old magazines about beauty, laugh at ads for diets and surgery. Zane reads an article about oil and says the old world burned itself for speed. Tally thinks about how the new world burns brains for calm. Neither system looks wise.

One night in the ruins stuck with me. They camp in an old library with a caved roof. Tally finds a children's book about stars with pages stuck together. She dries it by the fire and reads aloud while Zane leans against her shoulder and Shay pretends not to listen. For an hour no one talks about lesions or Specials. They argue about whether the book bear would survive in the wild. It is the only fully peaceful hour in the whole novel, and Westerfeld lets it breathe. That peace makes what follows feel sharper, because you remember what clear minds can do when not running, simply share a story.

The New Smoke and the cure dilemma

They find the New Smoke, a rougher camp in the hills. David is there, harder and colder. He barely hugs Tally. He is still angry that she betrayed them. Shay runs to him, then stops when she sees his face. The camp has little food, no doctors, and a lot of fear. The leaders argue about what to do with the cure pills. There are only a few left.

Here the book asks a hard question. If you cure pretties, you make them smart but sick and sad. Many will hate you for it. If you do not, they stay happy and controlled. Is it right to force clarity. David says yes, wake everyone. Shay says yes, but only for those who choose. Zane, shaking and thin, says the choice must be real, with truth told first.

Tally tries to make more pills with the help of a captured doctor and Maddy, David mother. They need a lab, clean samples, time. Special Circumstances attacks before they finish. The battle is not big armies. It is night raid, fire, hovercars with searchlights, kids running with backpacks. Tally uses her pretty party skills to confuse trackers, setting off fireworks and sound loops.

Zane is captured. Shay is cut off. Tally and David escape with the pill formula memorized in parts so no one person can be forced to give it. That detail felt smart. Rebellion as data safety.

The middle sags a little here for me. There are many camp meetings where people repeat positions. Wake them all. Wake some. Hide. Fight. I skimmed two meetings. Westerfeld seems to know it, because he breaks them with a practical job, fixing a water pump, sewing a cut, cooking rats that taste like chicken if you add enough salt.

Shay turn and Zane cost

Shay makes a choice that changes the series. Captured by Specials, offered beauty and power as a Special operative with a clear mind but icy focus, she accepts. She becomes a Special, strong, fast, with facial tattoos that mark her rank. When she next meets Tally, she is faster and crueler, but part of her still loves her old friends. She lets Tally go once, then hunts her.

I found Shay arc the most human. She was always the one who wanted to be special, not just pretty. In Uglies she wanted to stay ugly. In Pretties she wanted to feel alive. As a Special she finally feels sharp and strong without fuzzy happiness. The cost is empathy. She enjoys the chase too much. It is addiction written as surgery.

Zane pays more. The pill cured his mind but his body was already damaged by an experimental treatment Specials gave him as a child. He grows weaker through the hike. By the New Smoke he can barely walk uphill. He tells Tally he does not regret taking the pill because clear days with her were worth it, even short ones. He asks her to keep the formula safe and to not let Specials turn her.

Their goodbye is quiet. No big speech. He gives her his jacket because nights are cold. She gives him her extra water. Specials take him for medical study. Tally does not know if he lives. She walks on because stopping means capture.

That hurt more than action deaths. It is slow loss, watching someone you love fade while you cannot fix it. Westerfeld does not romanticize it. Tally feels angry at Zane for taking the pill, angry at herself for waiting, angry at the city for making health a trade.

Taken and transformed

The book ends with Tally captured. Dr. Cable does not kill her. She makes her a Special too, to use her. Tally last thoughts before surgery are of David, Shay, Zane, and the promise she wrote to herself. She thinks stay Rusty, stay ugly inside, remember. Then the knives come.

As a middle book ending, it is bold. The hero loses, is changed against her will, and will start book three as the thing she fought. I closed the book and stared for a bit. It reframes everything. Tally wanted to save Zane and Shay. Now she will hunt them.

What worked was the brainwashing made physical. Lesions, pills, headaches. It avoids vague mind control. Choices have biology. That makes the ethics concrete. Is a happy drugged life okay. Most readers will say no, but Tally joy in early chapters makes you hesitate, which is the point. I kept thinking about school and phones, how comfort can make you stop asking questions long before any surgery. Westerfeld does not lecture about that. He shows a girl who loves parties and also loves friends, and lets you feel both pulls.

What dragged was repetition of party scenes early on. Three balloon tricks in a row feel similar. I get that sameness is thematic, pretty life is looped, but reading loops still tests patience. A shorter first act would hit harder.

Still, Pretties does what good sequels do. It deepens the world, complicates the villain, and raises personal cost. Uglies was about running away. Pretties is about waking up and learning waking hurts.

Content notes. There is surgery and brain alteration, headaches, vomiting, nosebleeds, capture, fire and raid violence, mention of past betrayal and death, mild drinking at parties, kissing, no explicit scenes. The Zane illness decline may be hard for readers who have cared for sick loved ones.

FAQ

Does Tally take the cure pill?

Yes. She takes it late, after Zane. It brings back Smoke memories but leaves headaches and pretty reflexes. The cure is partial and painful, not magic.

What happens to Tally at the end of Pretties?

She is captured and made Special to hunt her friends. Book two ends with her changed against her will, setting up the next book.