Specials - Scott Westerfeld

Westerfeld, S. Specials. New York, NY: Simon Pulse, 2006. Print.

Summary:  Finishing the story that began with Uglies and Pretties, Specials is the final book in the Uglies trilogy.  It continues to follow Tally Youngblood and her adventures in the world where everyone is turned Pretty.  After being captured from the Smoke at the conclusion of Pretties, Tally has been turned into a Special: a human enhanced by surgery in order to become super-human.  While in the previous books Tally fought against the city and Special Circumstances, she is now one of them, and works alongside her best friend Shay trying to find the New Smoke and stop the spread of the cure for pretty-headedness.  Tally is no longer a free-thinking Pretty.  She is a fierce predator, and will go to all ends in order to find the New Smoke.  Things go wrong, though, when Tally and Shay attempt to free Zane so that they may track him to the New Smoke.  Zane tries to convince Tally to remember the way she was before, when she thought her way out of pretty-mindedness.  Tally does begin to release herself from the rage and pressure of being a Special, but cannot completely do so before she reaches the New Smoke, which turns out to be an entire city filled with people who do not have brain lesions.  This new city, Diego, comes under attack from Tally's city under the premise that Diego destroyed Tally's city's armory.  In reality, Shay and Tally were responsible for the demolition of the building.  In the end, Tally is able to end the war between the two cities, but promises she will remain to protect the earth from the New Smoke if need be.


Dystopia: Specials continues the story of Tally and her adventures as a Pretty.  This book is probably the least relevant to dystopia out of all of the series, but it still continues the themes.  Most intriguing is the war between the dystopian city which Tally hails from and Diego, a city much more tolerant of differences than Prettytown.  Tally finds herself in the middle of this war, and in fact is the partial cause of it.  Prettytown wishes to promote sameness throughout the world, and the policy of no city interference is jeopardized when Prettytown singles out Diego as the source of the cure for Prettyheadedness.  Prettytown attacks Diego in order to wipe out the cure.  Most interesting is Tally's role in all this.  In the beginning of the novel, Tally is now a Special, a member of a special band of Specials in fact that is allowed freedom to roam wherever they want so long as they attempt to stop the spread of the cure.  It's a bit unclear in the novel, but in the surgery to make her a special, the Dr. relesioned Tally's brain in order to make her mostly Prettyminded again.  For this reason, she now helps Shay in seeking out and destroying the source of the cure: The Smoke.  Tally's role as the hero of the dystopian novel is now somewhat blurred, and the novel becomes hard to read, not knowing who exactly to root for.  At this point, my list breaks down a bit.  Tally, however, still remembers being able to think for herself, and in the end plays a role in helping protect Diego, regaining her status as the hero.

At the expense of spoiling the ending, I would like to talk about it.  In the end of the novel, it is decided that Diego shall become the new model for how society should be governed.  Diego, though, practices some of the same behavior as the Rusties, exploiting the earth for materials, and encroaching into forestry in order to make room for civilization.  While they're practices are more ethical and responsible than the Rusties (they replant the forest, etc), Tally worries that Diego's practices will cause the same devastation to the earth that the Rusties did.  In the end, when everyone else decides to undergo surgery in order to revert back from being a Special, Tally runs away and elects to keep her enhancements, vowing to become a guardian of the earth.  This ending is slightly disappointing as it completely shifts the focus from the exploitation of humans, and the manipulation of humans through science to the exploitation and manipulation of nature.  While this is a worthwhile theme and and issue that arises throughout the series, I though that Westerfeld really pulled the focus away from the main theme of tyrannical governments and human modification.

Despite this last flaw, Specials overall is a very satisfying finale for the Uglies series (although Westerfeld later added another novel).  The plot gets confusing at times, and it seems that Westerfeld might be going for the wow factor, but in the end, our hero Tally ends up the hero after all.  I would argue that Uglies is still the most valuable for use in schools as it discusses the human modification and government control indicative of a dystopian novel more than the other two.  As an entertaining read, appropriate for kids in secondary education, this novel comes recommended.

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