Uglies The novel Uglies takes place three hundred years in the future. Tally Youngblood is about to turn 16, and she can hardly wait for her birthday. All teenagers get operated on when they turn 16. They are turned from an ugly – a normal person – into a pretty with a perfect face and body. All they do after their operation is have fun. But then Tally meets Shay, and Shay doesn’t want to be operated on. She disappears to the Smoke where unoperated people live, out in the wild and far away from New Pretty Town. Tally is forced to find Shay for Dr Cable of Special Circumstances (the secret police) – or she won’t get her own operation. So Tally goes on a long journey to the Smoke and finally finds her friend Shay. Reading: Uglies – Part 1 a) Read this extract and highlight all the words and expressions that refer to the looks of people. b) When you have finished make a list, group the words and find titles for your categories. 33–35c 1 “Come on, I’ll take you down to the library. You’ve got to meet the Boss,” Shay said. The Boss wasn’t really in charge here, Shay explained. He just acted like it, especially to newbies. But he was in command of the library, the largest of the buildings in the settlement’s central square. The familiar smell of dusty books overwhelmed Tally at the library door, and as she looked around, she realised that books were pretty much all the library had. No big airscreen, not even private workscreens. Just mismatched desks and chairs and rows and rows of bookshelves. Shay led her to the centre of it all, where a round kiosk was inhabited by a small figure talking on an old-fashioned handphone. As they drew closer, Tally felt her heart starting to pound. She’d been dreading what she was about to see. The Boss was an old ugly. Tally had spotted a few from a distance on the way in, but had managed to turn her eyes away. But here was the wrinkled, veined, discoloured, shuffling, horrific truth, right before her eyes. His milky eyes glared at them as he berated whoever was on the phone, in a rattling voice and waved one claw at them to go away. Shay giggled and pulled her toward the shelves. “He’ll get to us eventually. There’s something I wanna show you first.” “That poor man … ” “The Boss? Pretty wild, huh? He’s, like, forty! Wait until you talk to him.” Tally swallowed, trying to erase the image of his sagging features from her mind. These people were insane to tolerate that, to want it. “But his face … ,” Tally said. “That’s nothing. Check these out.” Shay sat her down at a table, turned to a shelf, and pulled out a handful of volumes in protective covers. She plonked them in front of Tally. “Books on paper? What about them?” “Not books. They’re called magazines,” Shay said. She opened one and pointed. Its strangely glossy pages were covered with pictures. Of people. Uglies. Tally’s eyes widened as Shay turned the pages, pointing and giggling. She’d never seen so many wildly different faces before. Mouths and eyes and noses of every imaginable shape, all combined insanely on people of every age. And the bodies. Some were grotesquely fat, or weirdly overmuscled, or uncomfortably thin, and almost all of them had wrong, ugly proportions. But instead of being ashamed of their deformities, the people were laughing and kissing and posing, as if all the pictures had been taken at some huge party. “Who are these freaks?” “They aren’t freaks,” Shay said. “The weird thing is, these are famous people.” “Famous for what? Being hideous?” “No. They’re sports stars, actors, artists. The men with stringy hair are musicians, I think. The really ugly ones are politicians, and someone told me the fatties are mostly comedians.” “That’s funny, as in strange,” Tally said. “So this is what people looked like before the first pretty? How could anyone stand to open their eyes?” “Yeah. It’s scary at first. But the weird thing is, if you keep looking at them, you kind of get used to it.” Shay turned to a full-page picture of a woman wearing only some kind of formfitting underwear, like a lacy swimsuit. “What the … ,” Tally said. “Yeah.” The woman looked like she was starving, her ribs thrusting out from her sides, her legs so thin that Tally wondered how they didn’t snap under her weight. Her elbows and pelvic bones looked sharp as needles. But there she was, smiling and proudly baring her body, as if she’d just had the operation and 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 70 75 133 Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv
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