Reviews
The Uglies is a four book series by Scott Westerfeld that dealt with a dystopia where everyone was made pretty, but brain damaged in order to maintain social order. The books starred Tally Youngblood, a girl who tried to protest the system, but kept finding herself used by those in power. It was an interesting and fun series, but I always thought that Tally’s friend Shay was far more interesting than Tally herself. This graphic novel series, therefore, was made for me. Grayson and Cummings retell the Uglies story through the eyes of Shay, a character that is actually quite a bit more active in her choices than Tally, and they do so in the form of a manga. Cutters is the second volume of the Shay series, and while I enjoyed the first retelling, this one was not quite as enjoyable. The problem with a retelling is managing to keep the story interesting without repeating everything that went on in the original work. Unfortunately, Cutters loses this balance, and the story is choppy and feels incomplete. These narrative choices make it difficult to follow what is going on, even if you’ve read the original series. I also found the art to be a detriment to the story. In this volume, Tally and Shay are pretties, young adults who have undergone extensive plastic surgery to become aesthetically perfect. However, the manga style that this story is drawn in makes it hard to distinguish pretties from uglies! I would recommend this book for fans of the series, but I hope that volume three addresses some of these problems.
Amazingly, I liked this better than the first graphic novel. The plot is far more interesting, and it’s really cool seeing the plot of Pretties from a different perspective. With the first one taking place before Uglies, you don’t get the same parallels. I still don’t like Shay and I probably never will, but at least this goes into more depth as to why she is the way she is. The graphic novel format certainly works better with this plot than in Shay’s Story, which I found boring. I do wish it was in colour though. The only real critique I have is that you almost definitely have to have already read the original series in order to read this, otherwise it would be really hard to follow - nor would it be as fun. It’s unfortunate they never finished the graphic novel series.
