Queen Ugly Dairy

Two reviews for you today:

Dairy Queen
Catherine Gilbert Murdock, 275 pages, 2006.

Okay. This book was really good! I liked it a lot. In fact, how much I liked it could have been biased by the fact that I didn't really like the book that I read right before it. Anyway, it's about this girl, DJ, who works on her family farm. The rival high school's QB shows up to lend a hand, much to her dismay. I'm sure you see where this is going...but there's so much more! SO much more. Like Curtis, her weird brother. And Amber, her crazy best friend. And so on and so forth. The thing that I liked most about the book was that DJ's voice was so authentic. She was frustrated when I would have been frustrated, happy when I would have been happy, and thought about stuff that you'd really have to think about in her situation. This book is a good book to pick up if you don't know what to read right now.

Uglies
Scott Westerfeld, 425 pages, 2005.

The first in a trilogy, this massively popular book does a great job of sucking you in. It's suspenseful without being too scary, and brings up some great thoughts about society and human beliefs about beauty (surprise, surprise). The book is about Tally, a girl in a society of the future. In this society, everyone has an operation at age 16 to make them "pretty." Tally is a good kid, a normal girl, but she gets sucked in to the drama of a friend who doesn't want to become pretty. Westerfeld does an awesome job of putting in little details and subtleties that make you believe his characters really live in the world he says they do. I guess, put simply, he does that thing all of our English teachers drilled into us: show, don't tell. And the fact that the writing is good is probably the reason that the books are popular with both guys and girls. I'm working on the second one, Pretties, now.