Specials

"Special Circumstances.
The words have sent chills down Tally's spine. But now she's one of them - a superamped fighting machine engineered to keep the uglies down and the pretties stupid."
Um, that's quoted from the back of the book, by the way. More or less.

What I like most about this book is - first of all - the  detail. Tally describes the best part of being a Special as "an icy clarity" - seeing, smelling, hearing, and feeling (not tasting - Specials don't need to eat much) everything in marvelous and wondrous detail. For example - when she tasted pine needles on the air, she described it as a thick syrup coating her tongue. Like sap. The detail made me try to see the beauty in everything of nature - made me appreciate it more.

In the third book of the trilogy, Scott Westerfeld takes a new route in the approach that he'd been using for the whole series: self doubt and/or personality conflict.
There was a whole lot of brain damage, too.
Anyways, the new route is not something you can find in many books at present and something I'd considered writing about even before I'd realized that Specials fit into this category: what happens to your story if you are the bad guy? This makes everything so exciting as Tally, for the last time, rewires her mind herself.
The wild is what rewired her. When she was an ugly, it took making the journey to the Smoke all alone - and then living there - to see how superficial and manipulative (don't get started on the brain-damaging part of it!) being pretty was - to see what was wrong with pretty life. Even before she knew about the brain lesions (like tiny scars/cancer in your brain). After she became pretty, she rewired herself to understand the meaning of bubbly and was totally cured after leaving for the wild again to escape the city and its traps; but she and her friends were separated and she had to trek across the forests to make her way back to them. Alone. Then, when she became Special, even though she was in the wild all the time, she was still a Special-head. But when she followed her love Zane through the wild without her Special-head best friend, she didn't feel the [insert word for "opposite of humble] that having a Special mind was.

This makes you realize many things and answers every single one of your questions from before except one: What happens next? You end the book on, yet again, a cliffhanger. But not to worry. There's an epilogue book.