Specials

What's inside (7 sections)

1. Running with the Cutters
2. Zane in the hospital
3. The Armory and the road out
4. Diego and the cure for being Special
5. Attack, loss, and telling the truth
6. Key takeaways
7. FAQ

I finished Pretties late at night and could not leave Tally where that book leaves her. She had been caught and cut into something she fought for two books. I wanted to know if any part of her would still recognize David or Zane or Shay. Specials is book three in the Uglies series. It came out in 2006 from Simon Pulse, around 372 pages. It starts about two months after Pretties, with Tally living as a Special.

That opening shocked me in a good way. Tally Youngblood, who spent two books trying to keep her mind clear, now loves being sharp and fast and a little cruel. She runs with the Cutters, a young crew Shay helped shape. They cut themselves to stay clear headed, to fight the fuzzy calm that pretty surgery puts in the brain. They live half wild, they answer to Dr. Cable and Special Circumstances, and they think of themselves as the ones who protect the city by hunting runaways.

Westerfeld writes Tally from inside that head. She notices movement before faces. She feels other people as slow. She likes the sting of her new teeth and nails, the way her body lands perfectly when she jumps. It is uncomfortable to like her here, and that is the point. I kept remembering the girl who loved Shay and worried about David, and I kept seeing how far the surgery pushed her away from that girl.

Running with the Cutters

The first stretch moves fast. The Cutters sneak into Uglyville dressed as uglies, to crash a party and look for the New Smoke.

Tally loves this work. She and Shay move through crowds of fifteen year olds waiting for their pretty operation, listening for talk of pills that cure pretty thinking. Someone is handing out those pills. The pills are meant for the Crims, Tally and Shay old clique, kids who pulled tricks together before everything broke. Tally finds the courier, a nervous girl with pills sewn into her jacket, and tells her to pass them on.

Then the grab goes wrong. The girl bolts on a hoverboard. David appears out of nowhere to help her. The Cutters chase, and Smokies hit them with gear Tally has never seen, suits that hide body heat, weapons that drop you without sound. Fausto, one of the Cutters, gets taken. Shay gets hurt. Tally gets hurt. They limp home empty handed.

I liked how physical this part feels. Hoverboards skid on rooftops. Crash bracelets thump. Blood tastes like metal. Tally heals fast and brags about it, and Shay laughs in a way that sounds more like a bark than the old Shay laugh. Their friendship is still there, but it has turned into competition about who is faster, who spots the target first, who Dr. Cable praises.

What also lands is how the Cutters think. They tell themselves they are free because they cut themselves to stay bubbly, a word they use for that clear, buzzing focus. In Uglies, being bubbly meant something else. Here it means cutting your own arm to slice through control. It is grim, and Westerfeld does not dress it up. The kids chose this, Shay most of all, because she wanted to feel strong and awake after years of being managed. The cost shows in how quickly they get bored, how quickly boredom turns into wanting a chase.

A small criticism here. The tracking tech and suit talk piles up fast. Sneak suits, infrared, hovercars, pingers. If you have not read the first two books recently, the first fifty pages may blur. I had to reread the party chase to keep who took whom straight. Once it clicks, it moves, but the start asks a lot.

Zane in the hospital

The chase pauses when Tally insists on seeing Zane.

Zane is in a hospital bed, thin, shaking, his hands not obeying him. In Pretties he took the cure first and it cleared his mind but wrecked his body. He had also been given experimental treatments as a child by the city, and those old harms stack up. Tally looks at him and feels disgust before she feels love, and she hates herself for the order of those feelings, but the disgust wins anyway.

Those scenes are hard and well done. Tally brings him food he cannot hold. She tries to tell him about the mission and hears how empty it sounds next to his shaking cup. Zane remembers her clearly. He asks if she is still herself in there. She says yes too fast, and both of them know it is not true.

The surgery that made her Special did more than sharpen her body. The doctors gave her flashes of anger and rushing joy, and a settled belief that Specials are above everyone else. She knows this in theory because Dr. Cable told her, but knowing does not turn off the feeling. When Zane trembles, her new brain reads it as weakness. When he talks slowly, she wants to leave the room and run.

I found this the most honest part of the book. Westerfeld lets his hero be unlikeable for a stretch. Tally skips visits. She picks fights with nurses to avoid sitting still. She tells Shay she wishes Zane would just get made Special so he would be fast again, which misses the whole point of what Zane wanted. Shay, who never liked Zane much, agrees too quickly, and that agreement feels ugly in a way the book wants you to notice.

If there is a flaw, it is that Zane gets little to do except suffer. He was lively in Pretties, clever about power and cities and old tech. Here he is mostly a test for Tally. I missed his questions. I think the book needs him faded to show what Special thinking does to love, but I still wanted one more scene where he gets to be himself before the later hospital chapters.

The Armory and the road out

Shay and Tally decide to help Zane by breaking rules. Zane wears a tracker, a necklace he cannot remove that reports where he goes. They plan to steal a tool from the Armory to cut it off, so Zane can slip away with the Crims toward the New Smoke.

The break in is classic Cutters, fast, arrogant, fun until it is not. They glide in on boards, dodge sensors, grab what they need. Then something blows, alarms scream, half the Armory burns. They get out, but the city goes on alert and Dr. Cable starts looking for someone to blame. Tally tells herself it was worth it. Shay laughs about the fire for days.

After that, they shadow Zane and the Crims as the group leaves the city. Tally gets a guide to the New Smoke from Andrew Simpson Smith, a funny, gentle villager from a primitive reservation who wandered into the city books earlier and stayed kind through all of it. He draws her a route with landmarks a city kid would miss, a bent tower, a river fork, a patch of white flowers.

Shay takes the direct route with the guide. Tally stays back with Zane group, watching from ridges, close enough to hear them cough at night. Zane spots her. He was always good at spotting her. They talk, they kiss, and then her body reacts against his tremor and she pulls away and runs. She hates that run for the rest of the book. I hated it too, which made it stick.

The travel chapters gave me the adventure I wanted from this series. The kids ration water, fix a hoverboard with wire and tape, sleep under crash sheets that crinkle with every breath. Tally, who learned to track as an ugly, reads broken twigs and old fire pits. She leaves small signs for Zane, a stacked stone, a scrap of cloth, because she cannot stop helping even while she is supposed to be hunting.

The pace sags once in the middle of this road section. There is a lot of watching from hills and reporting back and watching again. I get why, Tally is torn between orders and old ties, but two ridge scenes feel like repeats. A shorter version would keep the tension without losing the point that she is stalling.

Diego and the cure for being Special

The New Smoke turns out to be Diego, a coastal city built by runaways who decided to do things differently.

Diego surprised me. It takes anyone, it passes out the pretty cure openly, it lets people look however they want, tall, short, tattooed, plain, strange, no single pretty standard. Markets sell food from gardens on roofs. Kids argue loudly about everything. Tally walks in expecting a camp and finds a noisy, working city. For a few chapters she is almost happy, which scares her, because Specials are not supposed to feel soft about targets.

Then she sees the other side. Diego is cutting forest to grow, pushing roads into the wild the way the old Rusty cities did. The leaders say it is necessary to house everyone. The wild Tally loves is getting smaller while people debate in meetings. That contradiction sits at the center of the book. A city that freed minds may still eat the world around it.

Tally finds Fausto at a party, alive, calm, different. His Special surgery was cured. Before he was turned, he had agreed that if he ever got made Special, his friends should cure him back. They did. He moves slower now, he smiles more, he tells Tally they can cure her too if she agrees. She panics. An injector comes toward her arm. She jumps off a cliff with only crash bracelets to slow her, hits trees, hits dirt, wakes up locked in a medical room.

The doctors there are blunt in a way I appreciated. They tell her Special surgery put in flashes of fury and euphoria and a steady sense of being better than others. They can remove the body changes, the strength, the sharp teeth and nails, but they will not touch her brain without consent. Tally refuses, partly from fear, partly because she still likes being fast. Shay helps her break out before any surgery starts, and that rescue is messy and loud and very Shay.

Here the book asks its best question. If someone was changed without true consent, can they consent now through the changed brain. Tally says yes, leave me alone. Fausto says his earlier yes should count. Diego doctors say present consent matters most. No one sounds entirely right, which felt true to how surgery and power actually work. I kept turning that over after I closed the book.

My gripe is that Diego arrives with a lot of explaining. History of the city, how the cure is made, who votes on what, how the forest line is set. Useful, but it comes in big talky chunks at parties where I wanted more showing. The cliff jump and the locked room carry those chapters. The meetings around them drag a little.

Attack, loss, and telling the truth

Dr. Cable uses the Armory fire as a reason to hit Diego. She tells the city that Diego radicals attacked them, that the New System of cured, arguing cities will bring back the old wars for resources. Specials prepare for a strike. Shay and the other Cutters, now cured by Fausto, ask Tally to help protect the hospital when the attack comes.

Tally says yes. She helps move beds, carry kids, stack supplies. She is still strong, still fast, still Special, and for once she uses it to shield instead of chase. The attack itself is confused on purpose, smoke, sirens, hovercars loud overhead, orders shouted over each other. In that mess, Zane dies. He had just had surgery to fix his tremors. His body could not handle the strain during the chaos and his heart stopped.

I sat with that for a while. No heroic last stand. No long goodbye. A boy who wanted a clear mind dies in a hallway while people run past with stretchers. Tally does not get to fix the kiss she ruined or the visits she skipped. Grief hits her through the Special calm like a hand through ice. It does not cure her, but it cracks the story she told herself that being above love made her safe.

What Tally does next matters more than any fight. She leaves Diego, finds Dr. Cable, and tells the truth, that she and Shay blew the Armory, not Diego. On the way she meets David in the Rusty Ruins. He flew out to reach her in time, thin, older, still steady. He says he believes she can think her way out of the surgery, little by little, by choosing. He gives her an injector with the Special cure and lets her decide.

Tally walks into Special Circumstances headquarters carrying that choice. Dr. Cable has taken open control of the city by now, using fear to hold power. Tally tricks her into stabbing herself with the injector during a struggle. Then Tally is locked underground for a month while the city shifts. The cure spreads. Diego publishes scans of Tally body and calls what was done to her a morphological violation, a phrase that lands cold and correct. People who loved being pretty start asking what else was done without asking. Dr. Cable loses her grip day by day.

Tally time in the cell is quiet and strong. She watches feeds, she exercises in a small square, she notices her own thoughts getting less sharp edged as Cable cure works through the leadership and pressure eases. She is still the last real Special when they come to despecialize her. She fights the surgeons, not because she loves being a weapon, but because she wants the choice to be hers. With help from an unlikely source, she breaks out.

The ending does not pretend one cure fixes everything. Cities still argue. Forests still shrink. People still want to be beautiful on someone else terms. Tally goes back to David at the Rusty Ruins and says she will stay wild and watchful with him. They will form a New Special Circumstances, not to police minds, but to keep cities from eating the wild. It is a little grand as a plan, and Tally knows it, but after all the running it feels earned, two kids who saw both systems deciding to stand outside them.

What worked for me most was how the book refuses easy forgiveness. Tally hurt Zane, hunted friends, helped burn a building. The story lets her act to repair, telling Cable the truth, shielding a hospital, accepting consequences, without wiping her past. What dragged was the final headquarters stretch, which moves through corridors and cells and feeds quickly after the big emotional loss. I wanted one more breath with Zane memory before the plot sprinted. Still, as a third book, it deepens the first two and sets up a world where being awake is only the start.

Content notes. There is self cutting to stay focused, surgery and body modification, hospital illness and death, fire and air attack with injuries, capture and imprisonment, kissing, mild language, no explicit scenes. The Zane decline and his death may be hard if you have sat with illness in your own life.

FAQ

When was Specials published?

Simon Pulse published it in 2006. The first edition runs 372 pages and the ISBN is 9780689865404.

Who are the main characters?

Tally Youngblood, now a Cutter Special, her friend Shay, Zane in hospital, David of the Smoke, and Dr. Cable.

Is it part of a series?

Yes. It is book three in the Uglies series, after Uglies and Pretties, followed by Extras.