Rating: 4/5
The Beauty is a fairly intense book centered around an STI. A new disease is discovered that causes the infected to become beautiful: their weight and general appearance changes to make them more attractive. As a result, many people are actively seeking to become infected.
At the point this book starts out the disease has been around for roughly two years. In the opening sequence we see what appears to be the downside of the disease as someone dies in a pretty graphic way. This sets up the story for the protagonists, detectives who specialize in cases involving people afflicted by the beauty virus.
I like that the creators cover a lot of different angles to the story. We see perspective from the detectives, people with the beauty virus and those without it, pharmaceutical companies working on a cure, and pro- and anti-beauty groups. I felt that there was a pretty pessimistic view put forth by the book. I hope this gets balanced out a bit more as the story unfolds.
There is actually a lot more action and a lot less sex than I would have anticipated based on the premise. I was reminded of Ordinary by Rob Williams quite a bit while reading this, probably because they both center around a virus and I read that book recently. The creators did a great job making it easy to distinguish between people with beauty and those without just by looking at the images.
The book hits the ground running and gets things up to speed quickly. There are some curveballs in the story, which make it worth reading to the end.
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