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Summary
Summary
In the fourth book in the Uglies series, it's all about fame. In Extras, everyone's social status is constantly monitored and rated.
Author Notes
Scott Westerfeld was born in Dallas, Texas on May 5, 1963. He received a degree in philosophy from Vassar College in 1985. Before becoming a full time writer, he held several jobs including factory worker, software designer, editor, and substitute teacher. His works for young adults include the Uglies series, the Midnighters series, and The Last Days. He is the co-author of the Zeroes series written with Margo Lanagan and Deborah Biancotti. He also writes science fiction novels for adults. He has won numerous awards including a Special Citation for the 2000 Philip K. Dick Award for Evolution's Darling, a Victorian Premier's Award for So Yesterday, and an Aurealis Award for The Secret Hour.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 5-8-In the fourth volume (Simon Pulse, 2007) in Scott Westerfeld's "Uglies" series, popularity is the priority. Fifteen-year-old Aya Fuse is determined to "kick" a story that will catapult her face rank into the top thousand and bring her the popularity she so desperately desires. A chance meeting with the Sly Girls, a group whose unbelievably dangerous and cool tricks are so far unknown to the public, seems like Aya's ticket to fame. But what she doesn't count on is being sucked into a frenzied race to save the world from alien freaks. Fans of the earlier titles (Peeps, Pretties, and Uglies) will relish the return of super heroine Tally Youngblood and her clique of "cutters" appear late in the story. Carine Montbertrand's slightly nasal and robotic-like narration is a good fit for these teen characters who operate in a world of computer gadgetry ruled by "tech-heads" and "surge monkeys," and her vocal inflections allow listeners to clearly distinguish among characters. While the story line here is not as strong as some of the previous titles, and despite a heavy-handed environmental emphasis, the action-packed plot and quirky personalities make this a fun listen.-Cindy Lombardo, Cleveland Public Library, OH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Extras wraps up Scott Westerfeld's Uglies series. In this fourth outing, life has become an enormous digital reality show-a constant competition for attention and fame; against this backdrop, an unpopular 15-year-old "extra" stumbles upon an under-the-radar group called the Sly Girls and risks a perilous path to celebrity. (Simon Pulse, $16.99 432p ages 12-up ISBN 9781-4169-5117-9; Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
(Middle School, High School) Westerfeld begins this new entry in his Uglies series afresh -- with a new protagonist, Aya, who's an ""extra"" (face rank stuck in the mid-400,000s) in a city run on a ""reputation economy."" If Aya can win fame as a ""kicker,"" reporting with her trusty hovercam on a story that captures the city's imagination, her face rank will soar and she might begin to match the wealth and acclaim of her renowned older brother. But things get complicated when Aya's big lead, a clique that courts death to surf the mag-lev trains, uncovers a potential city-killing weapon -- and even more complicated when Aya and her friends are kidnapped by the inhuman creatures who created it. That's when the legendary Tally Youngblood (Uglies; Pretties, rev. 11/05; Specials, rev. 9/06) steps in. As in So Yesterday (rev. 1/05), Westerfeld shows he has a finger on the pulse of our reputation economy, alchemizing the cult of celebrity, advertising's constant competition for consumer attention, and social networking technology like MySpace into a post-apocalyptic Japanese atopia that will engage gear-heads and philosophers alike. High-speed hoverboard chases and a wealth of cutting-edge wizardry such as nanos and smart matter keep the action popping, taking us on a thrilling joyride through Westerfeld's futuristic, technology-rich imagination. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A thought-provoking add-on to the Uglies series. Three years have passed since the mind-rain, when Tally and the Cutters freed the world from bubblehead surgery. Now cities create their own cultures, blending old traditions (lost for centuries) and new technology. Fifteen-year-old Aya lives in a Japanese city structured on a reputation economy. Each person's fame rank (re-calculated constantly) determines their material capital, so getting noticed (for anything from a tech/fashion fad to groundbreaking science) is everyone's priority. Everyone except the Sly Girls--a clique doing mad physical tricks, but, shockingly, incognito. Attempting to kick (blog) their story, Aya discovers unrecognizable beings stockpiling missile-like objects. Are they surge-monkeys? Aliens? Or has society regressed to mass weaponry? When Tally and Shay appear, suspense heats up. Westerfeld excels at showing the emotional underpinnings of a fame economy: Aya experiences obscurity panic, feeling "unreal" unless her actions are recorded. The dnouement is thin and rushed, but the fast action, cool technology (eyescreens, manga faces) and spot-on relevance to contemporary Internet issues provide plenty of adrenaline. (Science fiction. YA) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
This fourth entry in the Uglies series will keep Westerfeld's face rank, to borrow his own invented slang, significantly above anonymous. Several years after the massive paradigm shift of Specials (2005), 15-year-old Asa Fuse investigates an urgent news story in hopes of boosting her public name recognition of crucial importance in the celebrity-based system that has replaced Prettytime's cult of boring, brainless beauty. Asa draws the attention of the story's possibly dangerous subjects as well as that of Tally Youngblood, now a legendary figure. As usual, Westerfeld excels at creating a futuristic pop culture that feels thrillingly plausible; for instance, the reputation economy of Asa's Japanese city, based on citizens' blog traffic, cleverly pulls in real-world phenomena from Google rankings to reality TV's populist celebrities. Too many subsidiary characters and difficult-to-follow action sequences plague the plot's resolution, but such problems are unlikely to faze followers of this hot-ticket series, who will expect smart world building and rich themes and will find both in spades.--Mattson, Jennifer Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
DYSTOPIAN fantasies are uniquely suited to the young adult reader, mainly because the usual story line - the hero realizes that his or her "perfect world" isn't perfect after all - mirrors the experience of venturing from the relative safety of childhood into the harsher realities of adult life. Whatever the author's intent, which is usually gloomily political, the story's psychological underpinning is the adolescent's shock at learning that some of what you're taught isn't true, your parents are flawed human beings and the world isn't constructed for your benefit. Perhaps that explains why even dystopian novels written for adults, like "1984," are most powerfully experienced in early adolescence, when Winston Smith's realization that Big Brother wants to crush him kind of feels like the reader's real life. To a young reader, and even to a reader who only remembers being young, the shrewdly satiric premise of Scott Westerfeld's extraordinarily entertaining series of Uglies novels might not seem dystopian at first: a few hundred years after industrial civilization has destroyed itself in an ecological apocalypse, humankind lives in self-contained city-states surrounded by wilderness. To distract humanity from ravaging nature again, a high-tech version of bread and circuses has been developed: under the age of 16, when you still have the looks you were born with, you're known as an Ugly, but on your 16th birthday you undergo an operation that turns you into a Pretty - ravishingly if conventionally beautiful - after which you are turned loose in a district known as New Pretty Town and encouraged to party like it's 1999. After this extended Paris Hilton period, you eventually become a Middle Pretty and have little Uglies of your own, and after that you become a Crumbly (though still a really good-looking one). On the face of it, it's an appealing fantasy - what adolescent wouldn't want to be good-looking and able to party 24/7? - but it isn't long before the inherent creepiness of a permanent club-kid existence leaches through. The first book of the series, "Uglies" (2005), chronicles the progress of a 16-year-old rebel, Tally Youngblood, as she links up with an alternative society of wilderness dwellers known as the Smoke. The Smoke live off the land and refuse to have the pretty-making operation. Along the way she learns two dirty secrets about the social order she grew up with. The first is that during the operation, your brain is altered, and the second involves a harrowing and morally complicated introduction to her city's secret police, known as Special Circumstances, or Specials for short, whose surgery makes them smarter, faster and crueler than the average Pretty. In a brilliant touch, Specials are recruited from among the same bright, independent-minded kids who might otherwise rebel, and by the end of "Pretties" (2005), the second book, Tally herself has gone from being an Ugly to a reluctant Pretty to a new recruit in the Specials. Every plot twist means lots of jaw-dropping action, most of which involves something called a hoverboard, which is basically a flying skateboard. The various hoverboard chases, hoverboard battles and hairbreadth escapes by hoverboard make quidditch look like badminton. Anything you can imagine doing on a flying skateboard, Westerfeld's got it covered, to the point where all that swooping about begins to smack of commercial calculation, as if the complexity, subtlety and darkness of this world weren't enough. But that's a quibble: even though Tally and the rebels triumph at the end of the third book, "Specials" (2006), their victory is not without its own contradictions, which are explored in the latest volume, "Extras." Set several years after the end of "Specials," "Extras" asks what the residents of a newly liberated city might do with their freedom and comes up with a chillingly contemporary answer. The novel's 15-year-old protagonist, Aya Fuse, lives in a Japanese city where celebrity is the dominant virtue, and where your worth as a human being depends entirely on your face rank, which works like an Amazon ranking: the lower the number, the better you are. "Extras" is just as thrilling as its predecessors, but it's also a thoughtful novel of ideas, a brilliant parody of the modern obsession with fame. Like almost everyone else in her world, Aya records everything she does with the help of a semi-sentient hovercam (a sort of floating soccer ball that's a cross between R2D2 and Weegee), using the resulting footage to boost her face rank. It's as if the whole world were like Facebook, with every citizen simultaneously a celebrity and his or her own paparazzi. The situation is the opposite of the enforced egalitarianism of beauty in the earlier books; here, Westerfeld slyly shows what happens when you take the brakes off and let the market of media exposure determine individual worth. WITH its combination of high-stakes melodrama, cinematic action and thought-provoking insight into some really thorny questions of human nature, the new novel, like its predecessors, is a superb piece of popular art, reminiscent less of other young adult books than of another pop masterpiece, the revived "Battlestar Galactica." Like Tally in the first book when she runs off to join the Smokies, Aya is a smart if confused girl who hooks up with a group of people who have rejected the fame economy, and together they come across some mysterious nonhumans who have a potentially menacing agenda. Eventually Tally Youngblood herself - whom Aya admires mainly because she's the most famous person in the world - shows up for more hoverboard derring-do, but also to deliver perhaps the most resonant line in the book, when she tells an anxious Aya just before the spectacular climax, "You'll still be real, even with no hovercam watching." If that's not quite as chilling as "He loved Big Brother," it's still a wonderfully shrewd evocation of the way we live now. James Hynes is the author of the novels "Kings of Infinite Space" and "The Lecturer's Tale."