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Extras (The Uglies) Review
Fame It's a few years after rebel Tally Youngblood took down the uglies/pretties/specials regime. Without those strict roles and rules, the world is in a complete cultural renaissance. "Tech-heads" flaunt their latest gadgets, "kickers" spread gossip and trends, and "surge monkeys" are hooked on extreme plastic surgery. And it's all monitored on a bazillion different cameras. The world is like a gigantic game of American Idol. Whoever is getting the most buzz gets the most votes. Popularity rules. As if being fifteen doesn't suck enough, Aya Fuse's rank of 451,369 is so low, she's a total nobody. An extra. But Aya doesn't care; she just wants to lie low with her drone, Moggle. And maybe kick a good story for herself. Then Aya meets a clique of girls who pull crazy tricks, yet are deeply secretive of it. Aya wants desperately to kick their story, to show everyone how intensely cool the Sly Girls are. But doing so would propel her out of extra-land and into the world of fame, celebrity...and extreme danger. A world she's not prepared for. User Submitted Extras (The Uglies) ReviewsNovember 20, 2008 Just as good as the others I love all of Scott's books because I always end up learning so much from them. Extras is no different. We get a society who is obsessed with fame, so much that they have hovercams following them around all over the place. The main character is no Tally Youngblood, but I liked her a lot and as usual, I love the things in the Uglies world, like their slang and all their cool technology. We get to see Tally again after three years, so that was cool, too. If you liked the Uglies series, you should read this book. October 3, 2008 Different Place, Different Time, Still Great Just as well written and adventure filled as the first three, Extras takes place a few years after the trilogy, and takes place in Japan in the new post-syrgery world. In this new world everyone has a video camera on them all the time, and popularity is ranked down to the last person. Looking for glory, our heroine finds a bit more than she bargained for, throwing her into Tally Youngblood's world. September 30, 2008 My Review for Extras Extras was a fanatastic book, and produced quite a few surprises. First of all, i was expecting the book to be in the point of view of Tally Youngblood, but it was featuring Aya Fuse, a young girl with no popularity, which basically dictates your life in the world after the mind rain. She struggles to find some way to make herself famous. (though many people complain that she was too obsessed with fame, how many of us can say we wouldn't if success was based on your rank?) Aya discovered a group of girls that will do crazy stunts for fun, all in secret. When Aya is about to burst and tell, she discovers something even more frightening, a group of missiles, that could launch metal at cities and make humans go extinct. With her older brother, and a famous boy who is sweet on her, she travels around with Tally Youngblood, trying to solve a mystery which might just threaten the world. August 15, 2008 Disappointment If you're looking for something like Uglies this isn't it. I felt as though it had written by a different author! August 4, 2008 not as great book, good time passer the few objections to the book i have is this: 1.aya can be very annoying. she is obsessed with fame in a way that wildly surpasses tally's obsession with being a "pretty" in the book uglies. 2.aya is simply not as interesting a character as tally, or even shay. i would have enjoyed a book more that was about tally and more tally. she has developed, struggled, failed, and won, and she is a really fascinating character in this book. i wanted to know what was going on in her head. 3.now that i think about it, this book does have a pretty boring ending, but it wasn't bad or anything. the whole book was so confusing and unexpected that it was a bit of a relief for things to go back to normal(as normal as they can be in aya's world. 4.i didn't love the characters. the books before? i loved them. they fascinated and frustrated me to no end. the ones i didn't love in the former books were still pretty cool to watch. this book left me still loving the older charasters, but not the new ones. i didn't hate them, but they weren't as powerful. my commendations: 1.it was kinda interesting to see tally and shay and david from the outside. tally is a lot more insane then i realized. 2.plot was cool, in some ways. the adventuresome girls in this novel that aya plans to publish are pretty darn cool. 3.i've already said it partially, but the parts with tally in them are still the most interesting. so it kinda was cool, but it didn't spellbind me. don't get me wrong, most readers will be so dazzled they will LOVE it at first, like i did. and it was a good book. i don't think you should avoid all "add-ons", especially not this one. it won't screw up tally's story (and make you wanna forget you read it beacause it ended wrong like some last books in series). read it, like it, and then go reread pretties or uglies so you can make up for the lack of true character struggle or characters that you care enough about to wait through their struggle. July 29, 2008 Extra Good Pros: An original, believable concept, great characters. Cons: Ending is a bit of a let down. I was a bit reluctant to read this book, as I thought that Westerfield's last attempt, Specials, was the weakest in the series. Nevertheless, I am a fan of the series in general and when I saw this book in Borders, I had to pick it up. I was not disappointed. Aya, a fifteen-year-old living in a society with a reputation based economic system, makes a more interesting protagonist than Tally Youngblood. Her curiosity, independence, and ambition drive the story along much better than Tally's initial wishy-washiness in Uglies. Aya's cohorts Ren and Hiro are also very well done and I am left with the impression that the weakest characters in the whole thing are the ones who from the previous books who show up in the last few chapters. The story concept is just as original and fascinating as Uglies, if not more. In a world where people are constantly checking their internet popularity, Aya's world which tracks the number of times a person's name is spoken and gives extra goods and services to those with a high number seems eerily familiar and yet remote enough to make an good fantastical concept. The only flaw in the way that Aya's city is presented is that I find it hard to believe that the system would work so seamlessly only a few years after the end of the "pretty" system. I would conclude that Extras is altogether the best book in the series, but I do have to say that the ending is comparatively weak. The middle is good -- we build up from Aya wanting to be famous to Aya uncovering a conspiracy -- but the ending is a bit anticlimactic. I won't say more for fear of spoiling the book. Still, Extras is a well written Young Adult novel, with a great premise, complex characters, and page turning suspense. Five stars. July 19, 2008 ... The newest book in the Uglies series, this one takes place in Japan a few years after Tally has freed the planet from the mind control it was under. This book follows Aya Fuse, a kicker in Japan. Since the mind rain, Japan has leapt into advancing itself in as many ways as possible to make up for the fact that for 3 centuries there was very little advancement. They are set up on a system of popularity, the more popular you are; the better everything you have is. Thus we have different groups: Kickers look for new stories to report, to kick. Tech-heads: people that made new technologies and showed them off. Surge-monkeys: People that liked to change the way they looked constantly. Reputation Bombers: Cliques that would chant a member's name as much as possible to get the member's number up. NeoFoodies: Those that made up new food and new ways of eating them. The more you are paid attention to, the higher your number goes. Aya is doing a story on a new group, one that wants to stay under the radar: the Sly Girls. Aya saw them mag-lev riding on the trains one night and wants to find out more about them. To do so, she becomes a part of the group and uncovers something a lot bigger then a group of girls doing tricks. It looks like a group of people are using the old hollowed out mountains that were made to protect world leaders, to bulid something. Something that looks an awful lot like missiles the Rusties had in their time. I like this series, it's interesting and I look forward to seeing if there's going to be more. July 5, 2008 the extra book in the series What happens after everything you take for granted in the world completely changes forever? Lots of ideas come forth and are explored. It's now a few years after Tally Youngblood brought about the end of the Prettytime. Half a world away from Tally's city, Aya's city is full of people bent on fame. Everyone's fame is constantly measured, and everyone is always acutely aware of their relative fame. Aya is 15, a nobody with a low face rank, who is intent on being at least as famous as her older brother. To achieve fame, she is what amounts to a citizen journalist: reporting on interesting things that she sees in her life, hoping that others will read and link to it. Aya observes an elusive and secretive clique of girls called the Sly Girls. They pull hair-raising tricks which no-one else does. Aya wants to report their story, and so convinces them to let her join. In the process of one of their tricks, they discover a huge secret. In the process, Aya's true goal is uncovered. The Sly Girls agree that the secret they have discovered is too important to keep hidden, so allow Aya to report it while they go underground. Aya reports it, and is instantly famous. Her reporting draws the attention of the now-undercover Tally. Aya and Tally join up, and learn the true secret behind what Aya has observed. With Tally as a secondary character, she becomes a lot less sympathetic -- seen from the outside, she's rude, harsh, and needlessly violent. Aya can see some of Tally's struggles, but obviously most of that occurs only within Tally's own head. The novel is an interesting discussion of the perils of fame and those who seek it. I didn't find this book quite as engrossing as the previous books set in this universe, but I still devoured it. July 2, 2008 A little more Uglies... Fourth in the Uglies "trilogy." It has been several years after Tally Youngblood changed the world and ended prettytime forever. The beauty standards are no longer mandates. Though many people still opt to have surge, it is now a choice. Aya Fuse is a 15-year-old ugly, too young for surge and too much of a nobody to have a satisfying face-rank. Aya's city operates on a reputation economy, which is based on face-rank (popularity). Everyone has their own feed. More viewers equals more votes equals a better face-rank. Aya dreams of becoming famous as a "kicker," someone who reports gossip and trends, but rarely serious news. When Aya meets a clique of girls who pull crazy tricks, but are determined to keep their group a secret, she decides to kick their story. Hanging out with the Sly Girls leads Aya to a story that becomes bigger and more dangerous than she could have imagined. June 27, 2008 A Search for Fame (and Other Things) This, the fourth book in the Uglies trilogy, is in some ways better than the original series, as it provides a fresh viewpoint and new characters to look at the Pretties world after Tally Youngblood's radical revolution. Aya is a 15 year old in a Japanese city, a city which has re-organized its economy around the idea of fame, or face-rank as called here. As a near faceless extra, with a face rank down in the 400,000's, Aya is driven to find a news story that will propel her to fame as one of the best `kickers' (equivalent to an investigative journalist) around. Accidentally observing a shadowy clique known as the Sly Girls, who for reasons of their own actively avoid fame, doing something both dangerous and fun, she decides that doing a story about this group will be a decidedly great way to help her in her quest to become something other than a nonentity. But the story of the Sly Girls leads her to a much larger story, one with potentially deadly consequences for the entire world, and one which will eventually attract the attention of the person with the #1 face-rank, Tally Youngblood, while at the same time involve Aya in the moral and ethical quandaries that journalism sometimes leads to. The plot line is good, leading to some very unexpected corners of the world, and Aya is well drawn. The new society portrayed here makes an interesting contrast to that of the mind-hobbled Pretties, as without those mental limitations this new world shows a vibrancy of many different people heading off in all directions, from tech geek-hood to obsessive gossip-generating stunts. There's even some sly satire about things like how some people try to improve their Google rank today with a group in Aya's world who try to artificially boost someone's face rank by mentioned that person's name again and again. The above is all good, but I found a few things that nagged. There are some technical bobbles, which are difficult to detail without giving away the plot, but I'll give one example. When you accelerate a multi-ton piece of steel to orbital escape velocity in an air-evacuated tunnel, then launch it up into the air, the result will be a very loud bang, hearable for miles around, and this thunder will continue following the projectile for a very long way. This is not good if you are trying to conceal the launch of such a projectile, especially if you are launching hundreds of these objects. There are some plausibility issues with the methods and aims of what turns out to be the `villain' of this story. And once again, as with the original Pretties world, I found that the economic underpinnings of the portrayed society to be too skimpily described and worked-out to make me fully believe in it. These are quibbles, and many readers probably won't notice them amongst the fast action and all the new surprises this book has. A good follow-up to the original series, with some fresh and original ideas and characters, well worth reading for those who read the first three books. --- Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat) For more Extras (The Uglies) reviews click here.
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