Specials||Scott Westerfeld||Uglies #3 || 350 pages
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Top 3 Genres: Young Adult / Dystopia / Science Fiction

Synopsis: “Special Circumstances”: The words have sent chills down Tally’s spine since her days as a repellent, rebellious ugly. Back then Specials were a sinister rumor – frighteningly beautiful, dangerously strong, breathtakingly fast. Ordinary pretties might live their whole lives without meeting a Special. But Tally’s never been ordinary.

And now she’s been turned into one of them: a superamped fighting machine, engineered to keep the uglies down and the pretties stupid.

The strength, the speed, and the clarity and focus of her thinking feel better than anything Tally can remember. Most of the time. One tiny corner of her heart still remembers something more.

Still, it’s easy to tune that out – until Tally’s offered a chance to stamp out the rebels of the New Smoke permanently. It all comes down to one last choice: listen to that tiny, faint heartbeat, or carry out the mission she’s programmed to complete. Either way, Tally’s world will never be the same.

Finished: May 28th, 2022.

2022 Reading Progress: 2 books read.

My Rating: ★★★☆☆. [3/5]

My Review: [Under the read more - NOT SPOILER FREE]

I’m gonna try to write this review quick, I’m ready to move on to my next thing.

I’m glad this is finally done! It was mostly enjoyable, but also not without its fair share of nerve grating.

I re-read my review of the previous book before diving into this one, and I complained quite a bit about the slang. I’m ready to do that again for this one too lol. It was so hard to take much seriously with phrases like “nervous-making” instead of… like… “anxious.”

I’m grateful that it delved more into the world-building that felt so unexplored in the first book or two, but it sort of still seems a little flat. Everything is still unnamed and unspecific, so you just have vague ideas of where everything is, and it feels sort of childlike and incomplete.

Plus you can’t make me believe that this whole story is taking place around 16-year-olds lmao.

I see what it was trying to say insofar as the primary message, but it feels like the world-building does – childlike and incomplete. It came off as crude and rudimentary and like “baby’s first political worldview,” which I guess it technically is, seeing as the primary audience is intended to be teens.

Tally herself is insufferable lol. It’s cruel, but I’m glad Zane died to teach her a lesson and get her own head out of her ass. I’m still damn annoyed at how “special” she is – not only just in the literal sense of Specials in the plot – and I swear to god if she rebounds with David I may throw book four across the room. But I do think the insufferableness of it is intentional – those who were despecialized became a lot more humane and tolerable to spend book space with. I especially enjoyed Shay being the truth slap in the face to Tally’s ego and rage flare-ups in the second half.

But even with the annoying parts, and even with disliking Tally and how oversimplified everything is, I found the book still mostly enjoyable to get through, and intriguing enough to keep my attention the whole way through. Barring the slang, I found it easily readable and flowed well from part to part. I did have to take frequent breaks to keep up my patience with Tally as a narrator, but still, for the most part, I got through it okay and find that my overall reaction to the book was “shrug, it was okay.”

I’ll move on to book four to finish the series, sure. I’m curious about how it’ll all play out.

When you’re “not allowed” to buy books, but everyone has a sale around your birthday

It’s Asexual Awareness Week, which means that though I’d do it any time of the year, it’s the optimal time of the year to recommend and gather recommendations of media with asexual protagonists. Today I want to talk about two brilliant geeky YA novels with main characters that are not only relatable, complicated, and funny, but sit on a perhaps lesser-known place on the asexual spectrum: these are two characters who are confirmed asdemisexual.

Demisexuality is when you only begin to feel sexually attracted to people once you form a strong emotional bond with them. The most common misconceptions about it tend to be that the demi in question is just “picky” and chooses to get to know people first, or that they’re no longer, or never really were, asexual at all once they find someone they like enough to be attracted to. As with the many grey areas along the ace spectrum, it can be a tricky thing to both explain to people and define for yourself, especially given how society so easily conflates romantic, aesthetic, and sexual attraction all together as one big amorphous thing when they’re really separate and very different feelings—and, as always, different for every individual person!

I know that I’m somewhere under the ace umbrella, but finding an exact word to define my unique, personal scenario has kind of felt like I’m a sleep-deprived detective staring at a conspiracy board trying to link evidence together with bits of string. While I’m still bumbling along trying to figure myself out, it was immensely rewarding and heartwarming to read these two books where characters (who are younger than me, mind you) get to not only find happiness in their ace identities and have fulfilling relationships, but get to be the stars of moving and engaging stories.

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Was he gradually healing from the experience? Or was the darkness they’d left inside him like a virus, slowly growing stronger?

the midnighters trilogy by scott westerfeld