Extras Author: Visit Amazon's Scott Westerfeld Page | Language: English | ISBN:
1442419784 | Format: EPUB
Extras Description
From Booklist
This fourth entry in the Uglies series will keep Westerfeld’s “face rank,” to borrow his own invented slang, significantly above anonymous. Several years after the massive paradigm shift of Specials (2005), 15-year-old Asa Fuse investigates an urgent news story in hopes of boosting her public name recognition—of crucial importance in the celebrity-based system that has replaced Prettytime’s cult of boring, brainless beauty. Asa draws the attention of the story’s possibly dangerous subjects as well as that of Tally Youngblood, now a legendary figure. As usual, Westerfeld excels at creating a futuristic pop culture that feels thrillingly plausible; for instance, the “reputation economy” of Asa’s Japanese city, based on citizens’ blog traffic, cleverly pulls in real-world phenomena from Google rankings to reality TV’s populist celebrities. Too many subsidiary characters and difficult-to-follow action sequences plague the plot’s resolution, but such problems are unlikely to faze followers of this hot-ticket series, who will expect smart world building and rich themes—and will find both in spades. Grades 7-10. --Jennifer Mattson
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
About the Author
Scott Westerfeld‘s other teen books include the Midnighters series,
Peeps,
So Yesterday, and
The Last Days. He divides his summers between Sydney, Australia, and New York City.
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- Age Range: 12 and up
- Grade Level: 7 and up
- Series: The Uglies (Book 4)
- Paperback: 399 pages
- Publisher: Simon Pulse; Reissue edition (May 3, 2011)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1442419784
- ISBN-13: 978-1442419780
- Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 1.1 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Extras is the fourth book in Scott Westerfeld's critically acclaimed, New York Times bestselling series (originally it was a trilogy). The first three books Uglies, Pretties, and Specials follow Tally Youngblood, a fifteen-year-old girl living in a futuristic world so dominated by plastic surgery that anyone who looks normal is ugly. Extras is set three years after the events of the trilogy unfold, in a different city, with different main characters. The trilogy, however, sets the framework for everything that happens in Extras so while the book is great on its own it definitely assumes you know the story of the trilogy.
In this new world, where everything is changing, being pretty isn't enough to get by. Now it's fame that matters. The more famous you are, the higher your face rank is. A higher rank means more currency in a world where celebrity is everything.
Everyone is trying to get more attention somehow: "tech-heads" are obsessed with gadgets, "surge monkeys" are hooked on the newest trends in plastic surgery, and "kickers" use feeds (think blogs but techier and cooler because it's a Westerfeld idea) to spread the word on all the gossip and trends worth mentioning. But staying famous is a lot easier than getting famous. Just ask Aya Fuse. Fifteen-year-old Aya has had her own feed for a year, but her rank is still 451,369--so low that she's a definite nobody, someone her city calls an extra.
Aya has a plan to up her rank though. All she needs is a really big story to kick. Aya finds the perfect story when she meets the Sly Girls, a clique pulling crazy tricks in utter obscurity. As Aya follows her story she realizes it's much bigger than one clique: maybe the biggest story since Tally Youngblood changed everything.
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