Review: Beauty Queens

Author : Libba Bray
Format: Hardcover 390 pages
Release date: May 2011
Publisher: Scholastic Press
Genre: Young Adult

From the publisher:
The fifty contestants in the Miss Teen Dream pageant thought this was going to be a fun trip to the beach, where they could parade in their state-appropriate costumes and compete in front of the cameras. But sadly, their airplane had another idea crashing on a desert island and leaving the survivors stranded with little food, little water, and practically no eyeliner.

What's a beauty queen to do? Continue to practice for the talent portion of the program--or wrestle snakes to the ground? Get a perfect tan--or learn to run wild? And what should happen when the sexy pirates show up?

Welcome to the heart of non-exfoliated darkness. Your tour guide? None other than Libba Bray, the hilarious, sensational, Printz Award-winning author of A Great and Terrible Beauty and Going Bovine. The result is a novel that will make you laugh, make you think, and make you never see beauty the same way again

GIRL POWER is the phrase that just kept running through my mind as I read this book. This book is funny, sarcastic and so empowering for young girls to read. I had the pleasure of meeting Libba Bray at a local signing and reading. (see previous post) Having heard the author read helped me understand what she was going for with this book. Its a satire. The story is about a plane full of beauty pageant contestants that crashes and they have to work together to survive. Each of the surviving contests could not be more different from each other and yet they are all so similar. The author tackles the subject of sexual orientation, gender roles, academic pressure, family pressure, cultural pressure and any other kind of a pressure a teenage girl feels at any given time. The contestants really discover what they are made of. That they have their own opinions & ideas about who/what they want to be and not who or what family/ society says they are. I really did laugh and enjoy how the author put commercials in the book. Whenever one of the contestants needed/used a beauty product there was a commercial for that said beauty product that was made by The Corporation. The Corporation being the sponsor of the pageant . This book I think is for the older Young Adult, maybe 15 and up. If you liked Mean Girls or Bring it On, this may be the book for you. I can see this as an ABC Family movie. This was an enjoyable read and I would be stuck on an island with these girls anyday.

Book: 3.5 / 5 Cover: 4/5

~~~~~Tanya ~~~~~