Beauty Queens Review

Beauty Queens
Libba Bray
390 Pages
May 24th 2011

Summary:

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.

Review:

Did you every wonder what Lord of the Flies would be like with teenage beauty queens? Well reading this book you will find out, though it is exaderated a bit with the fenimin things. I really enjoyed Beauty Queens it wasn't like Lord of the Flies as I though it would be, but it was still really good. Libba Bray wrote the book as a TV show, in between the story there are commercial breaks, descriptions of the beauty queens contestants, and radio interviews. Having it written this way was really unique and refreshing.

Libba Bray created some very deep stories for each character, making them all differect for each other, and different from the stereostypical beauty queen persona. Through out the book the girls have a lot of self discovery about them selves and what they want to be when they grow up, and why being a beauty queen isn't what they want. This created a strong connection to the character because you can see the growth that they all go through in different ways. On the island we have a transgender, an Idian Valley girls, an africian american, a lesbian, and a hearing impaired girl just to name a few. Libba has a very humerous writing style and I found my self laughing out loud many times through out the book. The main thing I liked about this book was that it showed how the girls are inside when they aren'y being controlled by society and what they are supposed to do as a role model, and showed that beneath the make-up and the dresses these girls are real. Libba Bray did a great job in showing this in her writing.

Beauty Queens is much more than girls stuck on an Island there is a back story on why these girls are on the Island that I can;t really talk about with out spoilers so you will just have to read the book to find out ;) I though it was really cheesy in some of the tools the girls used to survive. Like a flat iron for fishing? I couldn't possibly see how that would work. And when a bunch of pirates show up on the island, making love interests for the girls? The books would have been just fine without that, even better if it focused on the survival part. I also didnt like the references at the bottom of the pages for certain parts in the book, to me they were distracting.

Overall I really enjoyed this book, i loved the humorous writing, and the whole survival of the fittest thing. If you liked Lord of the Flies, you will enjoy this. Also if you like The Even Stevens movie, and Gilligans Island this is a great book for you!