Uglies recap

In a future city, everyone is given radical surgery at sixteen that makes them beautiful and moves them into a life of parties across the river. Fifteen-year-old Tally Youngblood is counting the days until her turn when she befriends Shay, who has doubts and runs away to the Smoke, a settlement of people who refuse the operation. Dr. Cable of Special Circumstances refuses to let Tally turn pretty unless she follows Shay's directions and betrays the runaways, so Tally sets out into the wild carrying a hidden tracker. At the Smoke she finds work she enjoys, grows close to David, who was born outside the cities, and learns from his parents that the operation also leaves lesions in the brain that make people docile and easy to govern. She chooses the Smoke and burns the tracker, which is exactly what activates it. Special Circumstances destroys the settlement and takes the runaways. Tally and David free most of them, but David's father is dead and Shay has been made pretty. A cure exists but has never been tested and needs a willing subject, so Tally confesses her betrayal and hands herself in to be operated on.

Tally Youngblood is fifteen, living in the ugly dormitories of a city where everyone is given an operation at sixteen that makes them beautiful and moves them across the river into New Pretty Town. Three months short of her own birthday she sneaks over the water to a party to find Peris, her oldest friend, who has already turned pretty; he is uncomfortable at the sight of her ugly face and tells her to wait her turn. Escaping the mansion, she meets Shay, an ugly who shares her exact birthday and quickly becomes her closest friend. Shay teaches her to ride a hoverboard, takes her on illegal trips beyond the city limits, and refuses to join the game the other uglies play with the software that predicts what they will look like after surgery. For the first time, Tally hears someone treat the operation as a choice rather than a certainty.

Shay leads Tally out to the Rusty Ruins, the remains of a city from the age before, and admits she has been meeting someone from outside: David, who comes from a settlement of people who never had the operation. Shay urges Tally to run away with her before their birthdays. Tally refuses, unwilling to give up the life she has spent years waiting for, and the two argue bitterly. After one last trick together, Shay leaves the city alone, leaving Tally a note with directions written as a riddle so that nobody else could follow them. Tally keeps the note and reports for her operation on her sixteenth birthday, only to find that she is not being taken to the surgery at all.

Instead of the operation, Tally is delivered to Special Circumstances, a division of the city most uglies believe is a myth, and interviewed by Dr. Cable, a pretty whose surgery has made her frightening rather than lovely. Tally is told she will stay ugly indefinitely unless she follows Shay's directions to the runaway settlement, known as the Smoke, and activates a tracking pendant once she is inside, so that the city can shut the place down. She goes to Peris for help and finds he will not risk anything for her. With no other route to becoming pretty, Tally accepts the assignment, takes the pendant and a survival kit, and sets out alone.

Tally follows the riddled directions across hundreds of miles on a hoverboard, living on packets of dehydrated food and sleeping rough. Misreading one leg of the route, she strays into a vast field of white orchids, and a fire she starts there brings in the city's rangers, who put out the blaze and take her in. They explain that the orchids are an engineered species that escaped and is now smothering every other plant across the continent, a reminder that beauty designed without limits can be ruinous. Re-equipped and refuelled, Tally rides on, growing steadily less certain about what she has agreed to do.

Tally reaches the Smoke and finds a working settlement of runaways who farm, cook, salvage and build for themselves. Shay is delighted to see her and never learns why she came. Tally hides the pendant, takes on the settlement's chores, and discovers that she is good at the work and comfortable among people who simply look ordinary. She grows close to David, who was born outside the cities and has never been operated on, which strains her friendship with Shay. The longer she stays, the harder it becomes to imagine handing the place over to Dr. Cable.

David takes Tally to meet his parents, Maddy and Az, both former city surgeons. They tell her what their own research uncovered: the operation that makes everyone pretty also puts lesions in the brain, leaving people placid, incurious and easy to govern, and that is the real reason the cities perform it. Tally understands that the fog she saw in Peris and in every new pretty was put there deliberately. She decides to stay at the Smoke, and to destroy the tracking pendant by throwing it into a fire, not knowing that heat is precisely what switches it on.

Special Circumstances arrives at dawn. Specials sweep through the settlement, binding the runaways and loading them into hovercars; Maddy and Az are taken along with Shay and most of the others. Tally, who was away from the huts, is caught but breaks free, and David, who had been travelling, returns to find his home destroyed. Tally says nothing about the pendant. The two of them dig out the emergency supplies the Smokies had cached for exactly this situation, and set off for the city to get the prisoners back.

Travelling back, Tally and David pass through the Rusty Ruins, where David explains how the old world collapsed: an engineered bacterium that fed on petroleum spread out of control, and the Rusties' oil-dependent civilization went with it. Reaching the city, they use runaway routes and stolen equipment to get inside Special Circumstances headquarters, where the Smokies are being held for interrogation. They free Maddy and the others and escape by hovercar, but Az is dead, killed during questioning, and Shay has already been operated on and is now a pretty who does not want rescuing.

Maddy has spent years preparing a cure: two pills that could undo the brain damage the operation causes. They have never been tested, and she will not experiment on anyone who cannot consent. Shay, now pretty, is placid, forgiving and entirely uninterested in being changed back, which makes her useless as a volunteer and painful to be near. Tally finally admits to David that she came to the Smoke as an informant and that the pendant she burned is what brought the Specials down on them; he is devastated. To put it right, and because a willing subject is the one thing the cure needs, Tally writes and signs a permission note, returns to the city, and hands herself over to be made pretty so that Maddy's pills can be tried on her.

Tally and David break into Special Circumstances and free the captured Smokies, but David's father, Az, has died under interrogation, and Shay has already been made pretty and has no wish to be changed back. Maddy has spent years preparing a cure for the brain lesions the operation leaves, a pair of pills that has never been tested, and she refuses to give it to anyone who cannot understand and consent to the risk. Shay, placid and forgiving in her new prettiness, is useless as a volunteer. Tally finally admits to David that she came to the Smoke as Dr. Cable's informant and that burning the tracking pendant is what destroyed his home and killed his father; he cannot forgive her at once. She then offers the one thing that solves Maddy's problem. She writes and signs a permission note for herself, says goodbye, and walks back into the city to be turned pretty on purpose, so that the untested cure can be given to a willing subject. The book closes with Tally handing herself over to the wardens and giving her name. The surviving Smokies scatter to rebuild elsewhere, Dr. Cable's programme is untouched, and whether the cure ever gets used now depends on whether Tally, once pretty, is still enough herself to take it.