
This guy may have something. Via BoingBoing, a link to a story about ugly teenagers being more likely to become criminals than attractive teens.
Uglies, Pretties, and Specials are a juvenile fiction series about a society where, at the age of 16, everyone undergoes mandatory cosmetic surgery to become “pretty”. The premise is that if everyone is beautiful, no one has an advantage over anyone else because they’re more attractive, a science-and-surgery-based update on Kurt Vonnegut’s classic “Harrison Bergeron”.
Of course, there’s more to it than that, including brain changing, creepy overseers, first love, betrayal, and a brilliant invention called the hoverboard (guaranteed, you will wish you had one). The books are great adventure stories for almost any age; I sure wish there had been books like this when I was in my early teens, when the choices were pretty much Judy Blume, Judy Blume, and for “troubled” kids, S. E. Hinton.
Specials, the final book in the trilogy, is due in the US in early May.