Beauty Queens
Libba Bray
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Humor/Thriller
***** (Great)
DESCRIPTION: The Miss Teen Dream pageant, sponsored by The Corporation, embraces the young women of America as the bright and shining lights of the future... to sell innumerable beauty products, pitch TV shows, and monetize invented insecurities while raising the bar of the feminine ideal to ever-more-unattainable heights and placing more and more barriers to their success. This year's fifty contestants are on their way to Hawaii for the big show when their plane goes down, killing the flight crew, several passengers, and the camera crew. The shellshocked survivors face numerous challenges on the strange tropical island where they find themselves: thirst, starvation, tidal waves, giant snakes, hallucinogenic berries, quicksand, and the loss of most of their pageant gowns and accessories... not to mention a top-secret Corporation base under the obligatory volcano, key to a secret plot by Corporation boardmember (and the most famous former Miss Teen Dream in the world) Ladybird Hope for national and world domination via an insane dictator and weaponized beauty products.
REVIEW: This audiobook, narrated by the author, was one of the funniest, sharpest, most unpredictable surprises I've experienced in some time. From the very start, it turns its scathing satiric eye on predatory capitalism, society's impossible expectations for girls, politics, television and reality TV, pop culture, racism and stereotypes, and more in a story that is both an homage to and razor-sharp subversion of numerous tropes and cliches. It's set in a world that's both a funhouse mirror version of our own and eerily, depressingly, and even presciently familiar, especially when reality TV tactics really have been used to co-opt the highest offices in the land by the time I read (or listened, rather); the book was originally published in 2011.
The story kicks off quickly, opening with characters who initially (and deliberately) seem to come straight from the stock bin, but even from the start there are little twists and digs; as bold and brassy hyper-competitor Miss Texas is leading the survivors in a prayer thanking Jesus for saving all of them, the sudden death of Miss Delaware causes her to revise her prayer to saving "some" of them without missing a beat, before insisting that their priority is not to find shelter or food or even devising a way to signal for help, but to keep practicing their pageant routines. As alliances and rivalries form and break, the girls come into their own, all of them suffering under the burdens piled upon them by family, society, and the advertising agencies embodied in the ubiquitous Corporation. Their time on the island is as liberating as it is harrowing, showing them all what they're capable of when they're not under the pageant microscope and turned against each other. When the greater threat becomes apparent, nobody expects them to be able to rise to the challenge... nobody but the girls themselves, who are not who they were before the crash. (Or, rather, they're who they should always have been, but for a world intent on grinding them down to dust.) Periodic footnotes elaborate on celebrities, reality TV shows, products, music, and more, while commercial breaks hilariously skewer ads targeting women and girls with everything from gummy antidepressants for children to animal-shaped maxi pads to keep girls from being cranky during their menstrual cycle and inane movies highlighting ridiculous romantic expectations that undercut women at every turn. I snickered innumerable times while listening even as the action and stakes kept ratcheting up to an explosive finale. The audiobook ended with an interesting (and amusing) author interview.
For getting me to crack a smile more than once at my mind-numbing job (probably to the confusion of co-workers) and for exceeding any expectations I had going in, I'm giving this one top marks... and if you can listen to the audiobook version, I can highly recommend it. Bray's delivery just is the cherry on top of the tale.
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