The Uglies, by Scott Westerfield

I admit that I’m a sucker for a great cover design and a catchy title, which is why I initially picked up a copy of this YA sci-fi novel (the first in an ever-expanding series).

The novel follows a 16-year-old ‘Ugly’ named Tally Youngblood, so-called because she has not yet undergone the all-but-mandatory cosmetic surgery that would make her a ‘Pretty’. The Pretties all live across the bridge in a very Brave-New-World environment of care-free hedonism, whose sinister underbelly is inevitably revealed about half-way through the book. (Excerpt from the first chapter below):

Tally crept along the river until she reached a pleasure garden, and slipped into the darkness beneath a row of weeping willows. Under their cover she made her way alongside a path lit by little guttering flames.

A pretty couple wandered down the path. Tally froze, but they were clueless, too busy staring into each other’s eyes to see her crouching in the darkness. Tally silently watched them pass, getting that warm feeling she always got from looking at a pretty face. Even when she and Peris used to spy on them from the shadows, giggling at all the stupid things the pretties said and did, they couldn’t resist staring. There was something magic in their large and perfect eyes, something that made you want to pay attention to whatever they said, to protect them from any danger, to make them happy. They were so…pretty.

Now, without getting into the whole plot (which isn’t particularly hard to follow anyway), I can see how the series is doing so well.  The topics upon which its  theme touches are relevant if not timely: the inherent debate within the novel that we are genetically predisposed to see symmetry as beautiful versus beauty as created by societal norms; or the argument that we are heading towards a society that embraces sameness rather than diversity (i.e. all the Pretties in the book essentially have the same basic look).

 The problem I found was that the book doesn’t delve that deeply into these issues; it’s an easy read, with big font and simple vocabularly, (but no worse than Twilight, if you need a comparison, though much less expansive).  If you’re in need of a quick read or you know any fourteen year olds desperate to get their noses fixed, pass this book along as a deterant.

Otherwise I’d recommend the better-executed YA sci-fi novel, Feed, by M.T. Anderson (of ‘Octavian Nothing’ fame).  His novel has more of a ‘consumerism-will-destroy-us-all’ bent to it, but in the same span of pages creates characters that are much more complex and has a plot that doesn’t draw attention to the fact that it’s following some preordained track; it also has an absolutely brillant final chapter.

On my bookshelf, Feed has the distinguished honor of being the book with the single best first line:

We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.

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One Yellow Rabbit’s “Sylvia Plath Must Not Die”

Last night at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts I went to see the Calgary-based theatre collective One Yellow Rabbit perform one of their latest shows “Sylvia Plath Must Not Die”. I was drawn to the piece simply because my graduate performance thesis project was about Sylvia Plath. It was lovely to have a thorough understanding of the material that was unraveling onstage, but that is by no means a requirement for enjoying the richness of the words and the characters brought to life on stage. The piece, despite its title, was actually about both Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. This was a very pleasant surprise! Both Onalea Gilbertson as Plath and Denise Clarke as Sexton gave very powerful performances, inhabiting the essence of the poets in both voice and body.

The majority of the text was Plath and Sexton’s poetry, but there were also some key biographical facts woven into the dialogue. Ted Hughes and Kayo Sexton (played by Michael Green and Andy Curtis) also added an interesting element to the two women’s lives unfolding (and unraveling) on stage. It allowed the audience to jump from the reality of these women’s lives to the truth that was released through their poetry. As the show took you through certain important turning points in their lives, the key moments were marked with their poems. The construction of the piece was very thoughtful because not only did both Plath and Sexton have powerful dramatic arcs in their performances, but the audience was able to weave interesting links (thematically and through parallel choice of words in their poems like ‘panzer man’, for example) between the two women because of the construction of the piece and the placement of the poems. Plath and Sexton’s connection to each other – acknowledged at times or parallel without being aware of each other at others – created effective tension and allowed the audience to feel the painful isolation of both women in their respective worlds.  The show builds to a parallel fight – physical for Sexton and verbal for Plath – between the women and their husbands. The choice to have music played loudly (so you couldn’t hear the shouts) was very powerful.

I found myself wishing I could have been a fly on the wall during the rehearsal process or even have had the opportunity to see the various workshop performances of the piece to watch it evolve into what it is today. Regardless, the show gives its audience a beautiful glimpse into the world of these two female icons, without imposing judgement. Their words are again given life, and that’s what they both lived (and died) for.

The show is playing until Saturday, December 13^th and the link to the company’s website is http://www.oyr.org/index.html

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Sweetness in the Belly, by Camilla Gibb

During the year and a half Camilla Gibb spent living in the Ethopian city of Harar, the intent was to work, not on her third novel, but on her Ph.D. in anthropology. In a Danforth Review interview, Gibb’s touches on an issue that most academics have faced, “Part of what depressed me about my thesis was that I felt all the humanity had been expunged in the name of bigger theoretical statements. All the colour and texture and flavour of the place was missing… I knew I wanted to ‘revisit’ Ethiopia, but I didn’t know the form this would take.”

The result of this disparity was Sweetness in the Belly (2005), the story of a white Muslim woman, Lilly, who spends her childhood flitting around the continents with her bohemian parents, her early adolescence under the tutelage of a Sufi teacher, her late teen years within the fast-crumbling walls of Harar, and her adult years in a London housing-project.

Gibb’s writing is descriptive and colourful; you can’t help but have the clearest image in your mind’s eye of every bed Lilly sleeps in, every doorway, every street she walks down, the Harari women bedecked in colourful veils, the food, and the heat.

The book skips about between Lilly’s past and present, developing with each shift a little more fully the relationship between the white Muslim ex-pat and the Harari doctor, Aziz. The beauty of Gibb’s novel is that the love between these two characters blossoms so slowly, so carefully, with so many shifts in time, that you feel the pain of their separation following the outbreak of war in Ethopia not once, but over and over again throughout the book, as Lilly, back in London, recounts their story. To this end, I made the mistake of reading the last few chapters on the bus and had a tough time holding myself together on public transit.

There were also a few parts that I found particularly hard to read which have not been mentioned in any other review of Gibb’s book that I’ve read so far. Reviewers in Quill and Quire and The Georgia Strait all make mention of the feeling of “otherness” that is pervasive throughout the book, but no one reviewer points to anything specific. For me, the instances of female circumscion that crop of in some chapters — and they are graphic descriptions — took me completely off guard. Even seen as they are through the eyes Lilly, who is so keen throughout the book to prove herself a part of Harari culture, these episodes are written to be shocking.

On a more subtle level, Lilly’s “otherness” is examined frequently through a study of fashion: veil colours and materials, thrift store skirts, flip flops, piercings, henna, dyed hair and blackened teeth all seem to factor into Lilly’s sense of belonging even more so than does her devotion to the Koran. Clothing and accessories in this book are a religion onto themselves, but the theme is so intricately woven into the much larger fabric of the story, that the markers may go largely unnoticed.

All in all, an excellent, thought-provoking read and a lovely, heart-breaking romance sewn seamlessly together.

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