Beauty Queens by Libba Bray
Hardcover, 400 Pages
2011, Scholastic Press
ISBN: 0439895979
Synopsis
Teen beauty queens. A "Lost"-like island. Mysteries and dangers. No access to e-mail. And the spirit of fierce, feral competition that lives underground in girls, a savage brutality that can only be revealed by a journey into the heart of non-exfoliated darkness. Oh, the horror, the horror! Only funnier. With evening gowns. And a body count.
Review
I fell in love with Beauty Queens as soon as I read the synopsis. And then I impatiently waited months until it finally arrived on my doorstep. I pounced on it, read the entire thing in one sitting and found that my initial love was completely warranted. Beauty Queens is exactly what you expect from the synopsis and yet something so much deeper.
I expected a funny read and Beauty Queens did not disappoint. The humor was the kind that you don't exactly laugh at, but kind of smirk to. It wasn't exactly the back-biting digs I expected from beauty queens, but a more subtle approach of letting the characters speak for themselves and allowing you to be the one to mock them (in your head, of course).
What truly blew me away was something I never saw coming - the fact that Beauty Queens is a novel stuffed with social issues. Social issues novels tend to be downers, and Beauty Queens is definitely not - even given the subject matter. The girls are messed up. Not from the crash, but from life in general. They're all competing for their own reasons, and the revelation of some of the motivating factors are pretty shocking. More than that, there is a strong female empowerment message here. Once the girls really start connecting and opening up to each other, they realize their sick of being "good" girls. They don't necessarily want to be bad girls, but they want the freedom to be themselves. As the girls come to terms with what that means, readers will likely be caught up in the idea right along with them. I'm a grown adult and this book had me wanting to stop behaving as I'm expected to. It was inspiring without ever seeming as though it was trying to be anything other than entertaining.
You'll find something unexpected in every page of Beauty Queens. It's chick lit, social issues, humor, action, adventure, survival, and body glitter packed into 400 pages of awesome.
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