Specials, Scott Westerfeld

Sorry for the sparsity of book reviews at the blog recently. After the thrill of getting really immersed into the Harry Potter world once more, reading one book after another, I've taken my reading a bit slower than usual, as well as reading many books at once - and subsequently taking longer to finish any one.

If you come to Specials after reading the prequel books, Uglies and Pretties, you'll probably have a good idea of the patterns the story takes. It starts off, some time after Tally Youngblood and her friend Shay have had yet more operations to make them "Special:" Employed as government agents and set to crushing the rebellions among the ordinary Pretty folk, Tally and Shay have had their faces redesigned to intimidate the "bubbleheaded" pretties, senses finely-tuned to track and outsmart miscreants, and radio antennae implanted into their skin so they can communicate from afar. Their minds are made coldly logical, and their personalities rewritten once more to incorporate a large dose of arrogance. As far as Tally's concerned, this is the way things are supposed to be, until a reminder from her past sets her questioning her world once more.

Like Pretties, it is frustrating to read Tally's thought processes from the outside - when you know how she is brainwashed and manipulated into working for a crazy totalitatian government. With her new personality traits, I found myself actually disliking Tally this time around - even though I knew this wasn't really her. But the story begs the question: when her mind has been so meddled with, what is her real personality? Is it how she used to be, or what she seems to be now? It was interesting to see the dystopian world from other side; the point of view of those who not only support but enforce it, so that everyone can live in peace and order, and that individuality and personal freedom are a small price to pay for such a world.

Westerfeld also raises the questions of what it is to be human. What started off as a little bit of meddling - cosmetic surgery to make everyone look a certain standard of "pretty" - requires more and more meddling to keep under control. "Pretties" need brain surgery to prevent them thinking too hard about the ethics of the process, and then there need to be Special Circumstance agents to keep control, who need to be rewired in another way. As a Special, Tally finds herself repulsed by her former boyfriend Zane, because although he is "pretty," he is just the same as everyone else. All are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Despite the ethical questions, I found myself skimming through chunks of Specials, losing interest as the story seemed to repeat the same patterns as the first two volumes, saturated with technobabble I couldn't really visualise. It picked up towards the end, when Tally reached the "New Smoke," the city of Diego, where she finds that her very existence is questioned in its legality, and is faced with the dilemma of how to proceed in the upcoming war between Dr Cable's neatly-ordered Pretty city, and the New Smoke. I was surprised by the ending, and impressed that Westerfeld did not go for the easy or obvious ending, but I am in no great hurry to read the companion novel Extras. All in all, I think the Uglies story had potential, but that it was dragged out too long.

Crescendo, Becca Fitzpatrick

After all the hype about Hush, Hush, I judged it to be a very average teenage novel, with a compelling but not compulsive storyline, decent overall, but nothing that really stood out. I made sure to read Crescendo fairly soon after its predecessor, so that the story-so-far was fresh in my memory, and I could pick up where I left off.

I found Crescendo to be less average than Hush, Hush, but I'm sorry to say that I don't mean that in a positive way. Firstly, there were the inevitable comparisons with New Moon, book two of the Twilight series. In Crescendo, Nora feels insecure about her relationship with Patch, who seems to be keeping things from her, and before we are far into the story, she breaks up with him. Unfortunately, despite Nora being the first-person narrator of the series, I was not seeing the story through her eyes, but rather through the eyes of an outsider, moreover a reader who knows all too well how these stories go. It was far too obvious that Patch's secrets were nothing to do with him not really loving Nora any more, and that he had his reasons for keeping his distance. Nora spent a lot of time feeling angry with Patch for breaking her heart - when it was she who did the leaving in the first place. (Think Sandy in Grease.) She also seemed to have left her common sense (never particularly bright) in Patch's pocket, and I (metaphorically) read from behind my hands as Nora made stupid decision after decision and hoppity-skipped right into danger's pathway. Again, though, I observe this as a genre-savvy reader rather than from the character's point of view.

I thought that the story itself took a very long time to get started. Early on Nora discovers a hint about her father's murderer, but aside from a couple of scenes, that plotline is suspended for about a hundred and fifty pages while she tries to get over Patch, stalk Patch, get to know her returned childhood friend Scott (who is TROUBLE with a capital T and a capital ROUBLE) and work out if Patch really is dating Nora's worst enemy forever Marcie Millar. Once the father story is picked up once more, in the last quarter of the book, the pace picked up and I was able to lose my irritation enough to stop snarking and start caring once more. I was turning the pages quickly, wanting to know what had really happened to Nora's father, and just where Marcie Millar came into it all. After three hundred pages of teenage angst and sneaking about, the narrative returned to the action thriller of the previous volume. Just as it looked as if everything was going to be back to normal, Crescendo ended on a cliffhanger, because after all, you can't have less than three books in a teenage series.

I'm very sorry to Ms Fitzpatrick and all her fans, I want to award more, but Crescendo earns two stars from me.