It’s no secret that I think reading is fun. It’s an activity that should be enjoyable. I like a book that makes me laugh out lout, a book that keeps me on my toes. I like my books to be fun.
I don’t know that I’ve ever had as much fun with a book as I did with “Beauty Queens” by Libba Bray.
In her book Bray strands fourteen girls on an island after a plane crash. These girls have to learn to fend for themselves when they realize no one is coming to rescue them. The girls have to learn to let go of petty pageant ideals in order to band together to survive. As they learn more about each other, they also start to learn more about themselves.
The book is sprinkled with a healthy amount of absurdity. While the girls are stranded on the island, they have no idea they’ve unwittingly become part of a grand plan between an evil Corporation and a lovestruck, gun-happy dictator who carries around a stuffed lemur and calls it his advisor. (Absurd, right?) Meanwhile, The Corporation is responsible for literally everything. It’s basically every evil corporation wrapped into one. The Corporation sells the beauty products the girls tote, they produce all the hottest television, and they make secret weapons. The Corporation hosts programs like “Captains Bodacious” a reality series about hot male pirates picking up girls in port, and “Your Blood is, Like, So Hot,” about a group of hemophiliacs “who lie around looking anemic and sexy.”
The goofy absurdity had me laughing out loud, but beneath the absurdity, there is a layer of truth. The Corporation hopes to brainwash a generation with television and then sell them their products. Reality peeks out through the absurd.
The most important reality in this book is that society places too much pressure on girls. And that’s where we get to the good stuff. As the girls fight for survival, they unlearn what The Corporation and their parents have been shoving into their heads. Tiara, for example, is fairly dumb. When she completely loses it and starts chopping her hair with a machete, she starts to share her pageant experience, she started when she was two weeks old. All her life, she’s been told that all she can be is pretty, because she’s not smart. With help from her friends on the Island, she finds her talents in interior decorating, and learns about feminism.
Shanti, an Indian girl obsessed with winning lies about her heritage in order to get ahead. She obsesses about bringing down her competition, Nicole, a black girl saying “they’ll never let two brown girls into the top five.” The two have to work together to save themselves from quicksand, and in the process, Shanti confesses her lies to Nicole, while Nicole confesses that all she cares about is becoming a doctor. She only does pageants because her mother wants her to be a star.
Taylor, proud Miss Texas, continues to obsess over the pageant, even when the girls are stranded. Pageants were all she had after her mom left, and she was left feeling heart broken. Wanting to feel stronger than her mother, she worked tirelessly to make sure she was pageant perfect. She starts out as the bitch of the group, making the girls practice their dance numbers in the hot sun, rather than working on survival. Later on, she saves them countless times because of her iron will and need to impress.
Petra, who is still in transition to become a girl, gets found out when Tiara sees her bathing. Half of the girls accept her willingly, but several of the other girls have a difficult time understanding Petra’s feelings of dysphoria. In the end, she shows that she is proud to be trans, and the girls, and hot boys, accept her easily.
Mary Lou is obsessed with her purity ring, a fact which riles up her best friend Adina. Adina argues that sexuality is not just something for a man, but something that a woman should embrace for herself. After she loses her ring, Mary Lou takes some time to get to know her sexuality a little bit better, while also getting to know a hot revolutionary.
The girls come away with a better understanding of what it is to be a woman. Mary Lou comments “Maybe girls need an island to find themselves. Maybe they need a place where no one’s watching them so they can be who they really are.”
Away from the strict gaze of society that holds impossible standards over their heads, the girls discover themselves. And though their adventures were a little absurd, the reader comes away with a whole host of new ideas about what it is to be a girl living in today’s corporate run society. While learning about the 14 beauty queens, I learned a little more about myself.
And what could be more fun than that?
Yet Another Starving Artist 