Extras

This is an excellent fourth book in the series. It's different from the other three, yet has many relationships to them, and even includes characters from the first three books.

The events take place a few years after the ending of the third book; in this time, fame is pretty much everything. The pretty-time is in the past. People still live in dorms for much of their lives, and there's still alterations of bodies, but there are no more pretties, uglies or specials.

Instead, there is a face rank for each person. It's like a vast reality show with everyone gaining or losing face all the time, their rankings changing. Aya Fuse, the main character in the story, is 15, and is almost obsessed with her facial rank, which is rather low.

The face rank is determined by feeds, basically like personal newscasts that go out all over the city and sometimes beyond. A person's rank can change on the basis of his or her feeds, and the higher the face rank, the better. The economy of the city is based on race ranks and merits.

Hiro is her brother, and his current rank is in the top 1000 faces (out of a population of about 1,000,000).

Aya is obsessed with “kicking,” making some type of broadcast that will cause her face rank to rise. To that end she joins a group of girls that ride a type of hoverboard on the backs of mag-lev trains at high speeds.

Things change for Aya when the train stops inside a tunnel, and strange beings are seen in odd outfits, and a hidden passageway is revealed. Aya and the sly girls, the group she has joined, go back later to investigate. They find the passageway and enter it, only to find a device within the mountain that could be used as a mass-driver to launch bombs to attack other cities.

The sly girls knew she was a kicker; they allow her to break the story. She does, and becomes very famous instantly, but Tally Youngblood (from the first three books)pings her with a disturbing message.

She ends up with the others being captured by the strange beings, but it's part of Tally's plan. Then things get really complicated when it turns out that everything Aya had thought was happening was not actually correct.

The rest of the book deals with Aya trying to convince Tally that what they think is happening may not be happening, and Tally needs to stop blowing up the things that the strange beings are using.

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Young adult Index