Uglies: Cutters by Scott Westerfeld

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Uglies: Cutters
by Scott Westerfeld

This is the second graphic novel, based off the second book in the Uglies series: Pretties. I didn't love the first graphic novel; it was good, but the characters were far too pretty to be "normal" uglies, sort of defeating the whole point. And even though it was in Shay's POV, so much of it still revolved around Tally, just like the book.

Shay starting the cutters subgroup from the Crims is such a huge, divergent plot point in the books, so I was hoping much more of that would be in the book, giving me more glimpses into what we didn't get to see in Pretties. However, almost all of the book revolved around Shay trying to remember what happened at the Smoke and trying to figure out what she thought about Tally.

In Pretties there's a fairy tale metaphor that goes through the whole story. In this book, Shay gets her own fairy tale metaphor, which was a fantastic parallel. And there are quite a few moments before Tally arrives, where Shay hangs out with various members of the Crims. But I felt like there was way too much setup (party scenes that lasted a really long time) and then important details were just breezed through. We don't really get to see any of Zane's headaches, characters just talk about them in passing. The Cutters, the title of the book and the whole way Shay figured out how to stay bubbly, amount to something like just 10 pages of the whole book. I wanted SO much more of that.

I did really like Tally finally confronting Shay, and being on her side during the narrative. But she's so blinded by emotion that we don't really have a choice but to be on her side.

There were a lot of interesting choices made with this graphic novel. I'm not sure I liked some of the choices. But I'm still glad I gave it a read; the good moments made it worth it. And it was bubbly being back in this world again.