Uglies

Uglies is a dystopian science fiction novel by Scott Westerfeld, published in 2005 and the first book of a series. It is set in a post-scarcity world in which everyone is considered an Ugly until extreme cosmetic surgery at the age of sixteen turns them Pretty, and the operation is presented to the young as a gift rather than a requirement.

Tally Youngblood is waiting for her sixteenth birthday and for the surgery that will take her from the dormitories on the Ugly side of town to the city where the Pretties live. Her friend Shay has no intention of being operated on and vanishes before the date, and the authorities offer Tally a way out of her own waiting: help find Shay, or spend the rest of her life as she is.

Westerfeld writes the book as a fast young adult adventure whose premise is about conformity and the way a society sells it to children, and Tally's rebellion against it is the engine of the plot, which ends with her position considerably more complicated than it was at the start.