Pretties / Westerfeld, Scott

When Tally was ugly she promised her friends on the outside to be their guinea pig, yet now that she's pretty and she gets their message, she isn't sure she's willing to give up the life she's been enjoying.

Tally's perfect life as a Pretty is disrupted when she receives a letter from herself, written when she was an Ugly, reminding her of the promise she made to take a drug developed to cure the brain lesions that keep the Pretties shallow and happy--and when she takes the pills, she becomes a target of those determined to keep Pretty society carefree.

Upon Tally's sixteenth birthday she undergoes an operation to turn from an ugly duckling into a stunning girl, but she makes a promise just before the surgery to be the guinea pig for a future experiment.

Finally surgically transformed into a "pretty," sixteen-year-old Tally, now gorgeous and programmed to think only happy thoughts, is plagued by tangled memories of living in the Smoke, a rebel colony of "ugly" runaways hiding from the Special Circumstances authorities.

Tally's perfect life as a Pretty is disrupted when she receives a letter from herself, written when she was an Ugly, reminding her of the promise she made to take a drug developed to cure the brain lesions that keep the Pretties shallow and happy--and when she takes the pills, she becomes a target of those determined to keep Pretty society carefree.