Beauty Queens by Libba Bray
Release Date: June 1, 2012
Source: Purchased
Order: Amazon || Powell’s
In a nutshell: In the not-to-distant future, The Corporation runs everything and an airplane full of teenage beauty pageant contestants crash land on an island where they discover evil corporate secrets while learning every single lesson a good Tumblr feminist could ever hope to find in a YA novel. All of them.
Or, to borrow Kirsti’s excellent summary: “Lord of the Flies meets Miss Congeniality.”
We Judge Covers: This book was given to me by Kirsti. I do judge covers and I probably never would have picked this book up had it not been for her. Something about it reminds me of a Gossip Girl book, but beachy. Something akin to The A-List, I suppose. Except the ammunition-lipstick is kind of perfect and now that I’ve read it I dig this cover. I’m fickle that way.
Main Character: There isn’t really a single main character. Adina and Taylor might be as close as the book gets to privileging the stories of two of its girls, but there are about a dozen girls whose stories are covered about equally. Adina’s the one we meet first and she was an instant favorite for me. She’s a little annoyingly self-righteous at times, but she’s a teenager whose moral indignation is a big part of how she understands herself at the book’s outset. She’s big into journalism and her presence in the pageant doesn’t make much sense. Conversely, Taylor is the epitome of the beauty pageant game. She’s Ms. Texas, very southern, obsessed with pageant culture, and slow to take to the big self discovery that some of the other girls are doing. She’s also a genuine badass.
Love Interest: Plot twists aplenty! The few love interests are super hollow. I liked most of them well enough. The love interests aren’t hugely important (save for the pairing that consists of two of the beauty queens) as there are so many characters and so many plots that the love interests are legit just props for some other element of the big coming of age lessons.
Negligent Parents? Several. There’s a spoiler about a certain character who has a hardcore negligent parent of the ran-out-on-her variety. Most of them are raised by pageant parents, though, and there’s a fair bit of shitty parenting, though it’s not entirely negligent parenting. I’m not really sure what they were all up to while these ladies were stranded on this island, but the girls definitely spend a fair bit of time working through all the ways their parents fucked them up.
1430: I was unsurprised by how polarizing this book is on Goodreads. It’s very much its own unique little thing and you’re probably going to love it or hate it. There’s the slim possibility that you could be in the middle because you respect what it went for even if the style isn’t for you, but mostly love/hate. There were a few places it fell flat for me, but most of it was hilarious so I’m in the LOVE camp.
I adore the Social Justice 101 thing it has going on. It’s a quirky little cultural satire. Bray is incredibly tougue-in-cheek in her approach, with “commercial breaks” to advertise absurd products and footnotes about the various pop culture references being made. They’re all fictionalized for the story but they ring strongly of familiar media properties. The tone took me a bit to adapt to, because I wasn’t quite expecting it. However, once I got into the rhythm of it and understood why it was happening, I loved it. You can’t cover all! the! bases! in coming of age issues without playing with format a little.
#MEH: The hate camp has a valid complaint in that it’s not going to hold up well to the way you’d judge most stories. Flimsy plot, characters not fully fleshed out. Because of the scope of what this book covers, emotional moments ring somewhat hollow. This wasn’t a huge problem for me because the very sarcastic tone of the book, with constant interruptions from “The Corporation” and the like, sets an atmosphere that doesn’t leave you expecting much in the way of deep, emotional punch. Still, there are a few moments where you wish some of these stories had been tackled individually because you can feel the failed potential for emotional resonance. I also suspect the melodrama would ring truer for an actual YA reader.
The End: Fun. It’s somewhat expected, to the degree than anything can be expected in this ridiculously weird plot. (Again, in order to do what Bray attempted, she had to get a little weird.) I liked it, though. It all played nicely into all of the other statements the book was making, which makes sense since it was pretty heavily interested in making those statements.
Away Message Worthy Quote: “Because ‘You’re perfect just the way you are,’ is what your guidance counselor says. And she’s an alcoholic.”
For Traumateers who: Want their YA dystopias with a lot more sarcasm, fewer love triangles (NONE. THERE ARE NONE!), and with a philosophy that’s a bit more Brave New World than 1984.
Final Grade: A-
Nicole is the co-captain of Snark Squad and these days she spends most of her time editing podcasts. She spends too much time on Twitter and very occasionally vlogs and blogs. In her day job she's a producer, editor, director, and sometimes host of educational YouTube channels. She loves travel, maps, panda gifs, and semicolons. Writing biographies stresses her out; she crowd sourced this one years ago and has been using a version of it ever since. She would like to thank Twitter for their help.
