Tally has been waiting all her life for the operation that will make her pretty: gorgeous features, perfect body shape, big beautiful eyes, so that she can look like all of the other sixteen-year-olds and join them in their eternal pretty party across the river. Right now she feels ugly and petulant, and has nothing better to do than sneak out and break the rules by trying to find her best friend, who already turned pretty and lives in that other glittering world she is waiting to join. Then she meets someone else, someone who isn't sure that turning pretty is all it's cracked up to be. Pretty soon our heroine is entangled in intrigues, underground resistances, espionage, betrayal, and even gets to fall for someone along the way.

Tally is an ugly. She wants to be Pretty. After her best friend runs away from a surgery that every 16 year old undergoes to become "perfect", Tally is blackmailed by Special Circumstances to find her friend and the town of runaways- or stay ugly forever.

Tally lives in a world where everyone receives plastic surgery to look beautiful and almost identical. She makes friends with someone who introduces her to the possibility of life beyond the shallow world of parties she has been looking forward to after her mandatory plastic surgery that she will have on her sixteenth birthday. She turns down the offer, not understanding how anyone would want to stay “ugly” but is blackmailed into going along as a spy for the Specials who enforce the falsely beautified and ditzified life of the city. Her plans to expose the rebels dissolve as she finds that individuality and aging aren’t so horrible after all

tally is going to get a operation to turn her pretty (perfect) which is the norm. she becomes friend with a girl who runs away from the city/operation. tally cant get the operation till she brings shay home to the city against her wishes. so to become normal/pretty/what shes always wanted, she has to betray her friend and the smoke, a group that lives on the outside which full of those who want to don't become pretty.

All Tally wants is to be a pretty, but is it really all its cracked up to be?