Review: Beauty Queens by Libba Bray

Publisher: Scholastic Press
Publishing Date: May 24th, 2011
Genre: YA
ISBN: 9780439895972
Pages: 390 pgs

Rating: 3.5 stars

Summary from GoodReads:

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.

My Review:

I was very excited to read this book. I have never read anything by Libba Bray and when I saw this book on the shelves at Chapters I had to grab it. This review will be difficult to write. I so badly wanted to love this book but in the end I can’t say that I loved it. That is not to say that I hated this book. I really love Bray’s writing style. She is witty and eloquent and is amazingly talented. She is able to bring so many issues to light in the book including, corporate branding, GLBT issues and body image issues. I also enjoyed the little pageant queen bios and commercial breaks. I like the format of this book. That being said, I think the reason I couldn’t get into the book as much as I thought I would is because I didn’t find myself personally invested in one particular character. There were so many characters in this book and Bray does an amazing job of giving each character the same amount of attention and time in the book. I have heard so many great things about Libba Bray and I follow her Twitter feed so I think I am going to have to try another book. Maybe Going Bovine? Overall I give this book 3.5 out of 5 stars.