Review: Beauty Queens by Libba Bray

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.

Reading Level: Young Adult
Publication Date: May 24, 2011
Format: Hardcover

Series: n/a

Pages:  390
Rating: 4 stars

 

I truly loved this book. There were moments while reading it that I started laughing (and occasionally snorting) and had my husband worrying about my sanity. It was a satirical feel-good story (if really those two items can be grouped together) about girls finding themselves...and kicking ass...while wearing heels and applying lip gloss.

 

It was nice watching all the of contestants grow through the book. And while they might not all have gotten exactly what they wanted at the beginning of the story, there was still a happy ending. And the footnotes, pageant biographies and commercial breaks were hilarious!