Review: Specials

By: Scott Westerfeld
Published: May 2006 by Simon Pulse
Format: Paperback, 327 pages
First Reviewed: February 2011
Buy: Barnes & Noble//Books-A-Million//Amazon//Book Depository
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Frighteningly beautiful. Dangerously strong. Breathtakingly fast.

The words have sent chills down Tally's spine since her days as a repellent, rebellious ugly. Back then Specials were a sinister rumor — frighteningly beautiful, dangerously strong, breathtakingly fast. Ordinary pretties might live their whole lives without meeting a Special. But Tally's never been ordinary.

And now she's been turned into one of them: a superamped fighting machine, engineered to keep the uglies down and the pretties stupid.

The strength, the speed, and the clarity and focus of her thinking feel better than anything Tally can remember. Most of the time. One tiny corner of her heart still remembers something more.

Still, it's easy to tune that out — until Tally's offered a chance to stamp out the rebels of the New Smoke permanently. It all comes down to one last choice: listen to that tiny, faint heartbeat, or carry out the mission she's programmed to complete. Either way, Tally's world will never be the same.

Rating: 2/5

Third book in the Uglies Series. Okay, this is another one of those reviews where I went, "I'm pretty sure my mental state affected my reading this book," and thought it was true, but it wasn't. My mental state didn't affect it. This series just wasn't for me.

I couldn't get into this one. I just couldn't. I started it on the 30th of January and didn't finish until today. It just wasn't grabbing my attention. I would start reading, read a chapter or two, then put it down.

All of the books in this series so far have started off slow, so I figured it would have gotten better. But by the middle, I was still bored, forcing myself to keep reading.

The writing style was still just okay, though ellipses and italics came out of freaking nowhere and drove me nuts in this book. Westerfeld had never used them like this before, so I was a bit confused. Also, Tally's voice bothered me a bit in this one. I don't think it did as much as it did in Pretties, but it did in this one quite a bit.

Also, when it came to the characters, I just didn't care as much. They felt like characters and not people, which I prefer. In this one, I felt the author telling the story more than the story telling itself.

Don't get me wrong, I didn't dislike the book. I liked the aspects and even the plot. It just wasn't as engaging as I would have liked it to be. I'm going to be honest, though: I'm not looking forward to reading Extras right now. I'm ready for a new world, but we'll see how I like it.