This was a cute story written for children. Princess Cimorene is a terrible princess - she doesn’t want to embroider things or learn about protocol and certainly not dance! She convinces various people in the castle to teach her fencing, cooking, Latin, magic and economics. Her parents get so frustrated with her that they decide the only way to settle her down is to get her married. So they go off to the next kingdom over to arrange her marriage with Prince Therandil. Cimorene finds him an incredible bore and she decides there is only one thing to do: she must run away.
She runs away and finds herself volunteering to the the princess of a dragon. It’s unusual since princesses are usually captured by dragons or their parents send the girls to the dragons in the hopes of getting them married - since princes love to rescue princesses from dragons.
Cimorene herself has to dissuade several princes from rescuing her, including Prince Therandil.
Various things happen and Cimorene finds herself the Dragon King’s Cook and Librarian and is fairly sure she’ll live happily ever after.
Okay, so how to describe this book.
Tally Youngblood is an Ugly. Her friend Peris is now a Pretty and in 3 months, Tally will become a Pretty as well.
In Tally’s society, people go through a few stages: the Littlies, who are the very small children who still live with their parents; the Uglies, who are young people (I think ages 8-16) who live at school and are “ugly”; the Pretties (more later): the new Pretties, the Middle Pretties and (I think) the Later Pretties.
Tally is lonely after Peris goes off to become a Pretty and she meets, Shay, another Ugly whose birthday is the same as hers, so will become a Pretty on the same day. Shay doesn’t really *want* to become a Pretty and she runs away. She leaves Tally instruction on how to join her if she decides to do so.
Tally doesn’t want to run away – she has been looking forward to being a Pretty. The day comes for her to have the surgery that will make her a Pretty but when she gets to the hospital, she’s told that she can not have the surgery unless she finds out where her friend Shay has gone, goes there herself and sets off a tracking device that will allow “The Specials” to track them.
Once Tally arrives here, she doesn’t want to betray them. She finds that she likes the people she’s met, “the Smokies.” She also learns something else: that the surgery to make a person a Pretty also includes brain surgery to make a person agreeable. There are doctors who think they can reverse the surgery but they need a volunteer. Tally is that volunteer. She allows herself to be taken back to be made a Pretty and that is where the book ends. There is a sequel, “The Pretties” but I don’t know if I’ll read it.
This book is similar to The Giver by Lois Lowry and other dystopian books. It’s an interesting read, but I don’t really care about the characters enough to read the second book.
I had a lot of time to read this weekend.
This wasn’t the best of this series, but I liked it well enough. I don’t know if I’ll continue this series beyond the three that I have waiting for me but we’ll see.
This one described how the fighting claws came into existence, gave more owl natural history and other things.
