Saturday, May 4, 2013

Book # 60: BEAUTY QUEENS By: Libba Bray

A plane carrying teenage beauty queens crashes on a remote desert island. With a baker's dozen surviving, these young ladies must figure out how to survive 1.) each other and 2.) without the luxuries that we in the U.S. have learned to think of as commonplace.

This Lord of the Flies-style satire is setup beautifully.  There is narrative of day to day island life with perfectly place scripted commercial breaks and product placement footnotes as though you're watching reality TV.  Beauty Queens has a plethora of unique characters that explore relevant issues- race, self-image, transgender teens, abandonment, sexual awakening- all of it's there.

But of course, this isn't just Survivor with with a beauty pageant.  After some starvation, scary snakes, and "I hate my mother"-style confessions we slowly learn that the island is a secret hotspot for the illegal weapon-activity of "the corporation".  Drama bubbles to the surface thanks to some reality TV shipwrecked pirates and the story takes on a kick-ass ending and epilogue.


While this story is drenched in laugh-out-loud humor, the real triumph isn't it's painfully honest portrait of today's society- it's that with all this reflection of a superficial, corporation-controlled country Beauty Queens still manages to be a story about young women becoming who they really are when no one's looking.


A

**Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2011
**Library Journal Best YA Books for Adults 2011


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