Beauty Queens

Beauty Queens
By Libba Bray 
Young Adult (390 pages)
Published by Scholastic Press
Bookish rating: 4.25

Beauty Queens is a campy, over-the-top tale of a plane crash of beauty queens on an island---think Lord of the Flies meets The Hills---and I loved it.

We meet each of the surviving beauty queens, initially through a Miss Teen Dream Fun Facts Page! (Exclamation point in the original, thankyouverymuch.) The girls are hilariously vain and shallow and ridiculous, but because this is Bray and Bray is ever the champion of girlhood, each girl has her own conflicts and--hooray!--substance.

As the girls spend more time on the island, they become more like themselves as less who the judges (read: society) expects. As Mary Lou observes, "'Maybe they need a place where no ones' watching so they can be who they really are' . . . . There was something about the island that made the girls forget who they had been. All those rules and shalt nots. They were no longer waiting for some arbitrary grade, They were no longer performing. Waiting. Hoping. They were becoming." (p. 177)

Of course, Bray makes the ride to these girls finding their inner, not perfectly preened selves fantastically wacky and outrageous. As I've written in other reviewers of Bray's work, she obviously loves girlhood and boldly challenges the expectations we have for girls and, by extension, women. She covers everything from the virgin-whore dichotomy, to transgender identity, to lesbianism, to race, to mother-daughter relationships, to, of course, beauty. It's brilliant.

I knocked off a smidge of a point for the final climax scenes on the island. It had so many moving parts, I struggled to follow it. Overall, though, I loved this book and thought Bray's irreverent, on-the-girls-side, snarkily campy tone made the craziness of this novel WORK. Recommended!