A fun and interesting companion to the Uglies series that any fan probably wants to read. It's not the kind of thing you'd want to waste money on unless you're hard-core, but pick it up from a library, or just read it right in the bookstore. It's short enough.

In these pages, Scott Westerfeld authors his own insider's guide to the world he created, which is great for a lot of reasons. One, it doesn't get any better than when the author tells you about his own thought processes, ideas, and hidden meanings. Also, you get a wonderful feel for Westerfeld as a person, and he seems like a great guy with a sense of humor, really dedicated to his characters, universe, and writing in general.

In this guide, you'll find maps, histories of both the Rusties and Tally's world, the science behind hoverboards and nanos, the phenomenons of ideal beauty, cliques, and plastic surgery, meanings behind the names of characters, the ins-and-outs of the series' slang language, and various other tidbits that are just cool to know (like the connections between each books' "last words" and the real-world Radical Honesty cult).

Probably one of the better companion guides out there.

( )

Very interesting. Scott Westerfeld is actually pretty funny. ( )

So far, I've enjoyed hearing the real-life story that inspired Westerfeld's idea for the novel, but I could have, had I searched it out, found that on the internet. I've never read an "insider's guide" to a book or book series before and had always wondered what the heck they are. So I'm trying it out. I wonder if I'd have liked this more as a teen. I guess I'm supposed to pretend that I AM a character in Westerfield's utopia, and if I were, here is the handbook for operating the hoverboards. Here's a map of Prettyland. Here is a more in-depth summary of the rules, and the history, etc.

Update: I actually liked this! There's a section that gets way too scientific for me about the science behind the sci-fi (it gave me a headache) but there's also a lot of literary analysis & introspection on Westerfeld's part that would satisfy any lit major, except that it may give away a bit too much. But since his audience isn't college English majors, it should be okay.

In this guide, you can learn more about Westerfeld's fictional society as if it were real, find out the "why" behind many of the choices he made (character's names, plot elements, last lines of the books, etc.), find out which sci-fi elements are actually possible or in existance today, what he hoped readers would take away from the book, and even learn how to create your own slang via the rules he followed in making his. His super-fan club would enjoy seeing drafts of Extras, and I enjoyed not having to read Extras because he summarizes the plot & presents an in-depth analysis of its themes, so I don't have to read it. Yay! All was resolved for me at the end of Specials, anyway.

Who would I recommend this to? It would only be to students who not only read the entire series, but kids who DEVOURED it and never struggled with comprehension, because the reading is actually more complex in this guide than the novels themselves. I don't think he pared down his vocabulary at all, and wrote like he was talking to peers, not kids. ( )

Just some koool background information. No help in using the text for discussion. Ah well. ( )

This isn’t exactly a review. Scott Westerfeld has written a series called “The Uglies Series” it seemed to have started as a trilogy, but ended up with 4 books (please don’t make me spell that). This book is like a cheat sheet, a reference book to the series. A book to have handy while you’re reading the series, since a dictionary won’t help.

Scott Westerfeld tells us where he got the idea for the book (HAH! You’ll understand if you read it.) and where he came up with some of the terms and the ‘language’ he uses in the book. Be warned, if you read it before you read any of the books, there may be some things in there that could be considered spoilers. However if you are reading the books and getting totally confused, this book will clear up a lot of the confusion.

I checked this series out of the library. I have been reading books that took forever to get through and wanted something I could just burn through without being mind numbing. I read the first two yesterday. I think they’ll do the trick. ( )