It takes place in the distant future, with a 15-year-old girl named Tally. She lives in a world where everyone under the age of sixteen, who hasn't gotten this special operation, is considered Ugly. On your sixteenth birthday, you get an operation that makes you supermodel gorgeous. Of course, no one see any problem with that-- and there isn't, right?
Maybe not. Once her best friend, Peris, turns pretty three months before her and moves to New Pretty Town, she is very lonely. He said he would visit, but he never does. No pretty ever does.
Finally she meets a girl named Shay, and they become friends fast. Luckily, they have the same birthday! Tally's glad that she'll have someone to explore New Pretty Town with-- until a week before their birthday, when Shay tells Tally that she's leaving, that she's going to a place called the Smoke, where some runaways go when they don't want to turn pretty. The problem is, Tally wants to go with Shay, but she doesn't want to be ugly her whole life. She wants to join Peris in New Pretty Town.
So Shay packs up a survival pack, takes a hoverboard, and goes. She leaves Shay special directions, in a riddle so in case anyone else finds it, they won't be able to follow it.
But there's another problem.
Special Circumstances. These are Pretties who are a little like the FBI, or so people say. At first, Tally doesn't even believe they exist, and really, no one does.
Until the day of her operation, when Tally comes face-to-face with them, and they are super scary. They blackmail her, saying that she must go to the Smoke with a tracking device-- which she must activate when she gets there, or she won't become Pretty at all. Tally can't think of not becoming Pretty, but she doesn't want to betray her friend.
But she ends up going to the Smoke.
When she's there, she meets a boy named David, Shay's friend. David grew up in the Smoke. He was born in the Smoke.
David can see that Tally's not sure about the Smoke, and her feels he can trust her, so he takes her to meet his parents.
His Parents-- Maddy and Az-- are doctors, and while they were studying, they discovered something. They noticed these tiny lesions (like a cancer, or a wound) in people's brains.
After studying them, they figured out that normal Pretties had the lesions, but Doctors, Police Officers, Specials people like that, didn't have them.
Then they figured out that becoming Pretty changes you looks-- but it also changes the way you think.
Tally knows she can't betray the Smoke now, so she tries to destroy the tracker. She throws it into a fire, not knowing that the tracker self-activates when damaged.
The next morning, the Special come. They tear up the Smoke, completely destroying it. They take everyone there back to where they came from. But Tally and David manage to escape. Then, they sneak into Special Circumstance headquarters and rescue everyone. But then Tally discovers something horrible-- they have made Shay pretty.
Then Maddy discovers this pill to make Shay's lesions go away, but Shay refuses to take it.
So Tally decides that to save her friend, she must become Pretty, take the pill, (testing it out), and then, if it works, they can give it to Shay.
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