Beauty Queens

by Libba Bray

When a plane crash strands thirteen teen beauty contestants on a mysterious island, they struggle to survive, to get along with one another, to combat the island's other diabolical occupants, and to learn their dance numbers in case they are rescued in time for the competition.

• ISBN10: 0606267417
• ISBN13: 9780606267410
• Publish Date: 1 June 2012 (first published 24 May 2011)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 6 April 2021
• Imprint: Turtleback Books
• Edition: Bound for Schools & Libraries ed.
• Format: Hardcover (Library Binding)
• Pages: 396
• Language: English

Reviews

[Amber (The Literary Phoenix)]

This book came at me so unexpectedly, and I absolutely loved it.

Honestly, I was expecting something a lot darker after reading A Great and Terrible Beauty, but Beauty Queens is downlight laugh-out-loud funny! This book is highly satirical, so I think if it doesn’t tickle your sense of humor early on, you probably won’t like it. For me, I understood where Libba Bray was going with a lot of her regional stereotypes. And honestly? This is one of the best narrated books I’ve ever listened to. Libba Bray reads this audiobook herself, and she’s got all the regional accents down pat to their tv stereotypes and it’s just a delight.

Going in, I wasn’t sure what to expect as far as characters go. I usually end up picking one character and sticking to it, but in Beauty Queens, I surprised myself by really liking every single one of the girls. I loved watching them grow, even the ones that were a bit on the outside of the main story. I thought I would like Miss New Hampshire (Adena) more – as the anti-pageant feminist power icon – but honestly? I think Tiara and Mary Jo came out as my favorites. Or maybe Petra? Honestly, there are so many good stories being told here, all about embracing femininity and honoring yourself while standing up for women’s equality… there are just so many different angles, and I delighted in it.

Also, I just feel like I should mention – for the weeks spent on the island, Miss New Mexico had half an airplane tray lodged in her forehead the entire time. I know this is actually horrible, and medically just… wow, how is she alive? But somehow, the way it was presented, this was comical genius.

As I mentioned, the story is highly satirical and this dystopian United States setting is… ridiculousness. It’s ruled by a Corporation that’s all sunshine and rainbow unicorns. It’s a pure, unapologetic capitalist society. The Corporation enforces the lines between men and women, preserving beauty and femininity as the highest level of virtue. They also spent half the book trying to sell you their super sexist products, which is both funny and perfect. They also try to sensor the book. There are all these profiles by the girls with notes from the Corporation about how they should change their answers, oh maybe also not mention that a Corporation product makes teeth grow in your intestines THANKS. Really witty, and a perfect caricatured villain.

Honestly? This book came at such a good time for me. I needed something funny and absurd, and something that made me a little angry and was pretty predictable, but still super fun. As I said at the beginning of this review, your enjoyment of this novel will depend highly on your sense of humor. I positively LOVED it and it’s one I definitely want to buy. If you like Libba Bray’s other work, I think it’s fair to say Beauty Queens is very different… but it is still EXCELLENT.

[Bianca]

“And what did you find?”
“I love myself. They make it so hard for us to love ourselves.” Taylor stared off into the dark. Her face gleamed with tears. Snot ran over her lips. “The judges won’t like that answer.”
“Nobody’s judging you.”
Taylor choked on a sob. “Always,” she whispered.

— About beauty pageant contestants stuck on an island due to a plane crash, and how they help one another learn to love themselves for who they are, not what the world demands them to be. A hilarious feminist satire on beauty and consumerism. Awesome read!

[Stephanie]

This started off strong, hilarious, and dark. Then devolved into random insanity that was so repetitive I lost my initial stride with this one. Enjoyable, but maybe too long?

[clq]

I really like what this book sets out to do. I really like the idea of this book, I really like the politics of this book, I really like the moral of this book, and I really like the characters in this book.

I just wish I really liked the book.

I went into Beauty Queens blind, but it quickly became pretty clear what the story of the book was going to be like. A plane with a number of contestants on their way to a beauty pageant crashes on an island. They have to figure out how to survive, and while these women may at first glance seem highly superficial, appearing to care only about their appearance, their clothes, their nails, their hair, and so on, there is probably more to them than meets the eye.

Subtlety isn't a device that's used a lot in this book, and boy does it go at it with giving us the impression of superficiality. The stereotypical caricatures of shallow beauty queens are well and truly hammered home. Hammered home again. And then repeated in slow motion, just in case we missed it the first time.
It doesn't take long to realise that the initial shallowness and stupidity demonstrated by the characters is done incredibly deliberately, and leads onto the general style of the rest of the book. It's over the top wherever possible, and, indeed, in places where one wouldn't think it possible.

Over time the book elegantly modifies the caricatures of these women in a really refreshing and, I think, original way. Once the characters develop and become more than the "just" beauty queens, they retain many of their beauty-queen qualities. It's possible, and perfectly ok, to be strong, independent, and clever, while also caring about your appearance. This book could easily have taken advantage of the obvious stark contrast between "here are the silly beauty queens" and "they are not beauty queens any more, now they are strong and independent", but it doesn't. Rather than having the beauty queens change in order to become empowered, it empowers them through showing that they are more, not different, but more than what they thought they were, and more than what the shallow audience of a pageant expects them to be.

There was one aspect of this that I found uncomfortable though. The feeling that the women are being made fun of never went away entirely. It would pop back up in form of a joke or a comment that just felt out of place. It was like small chinks in the armour of the otherwise brilliant and uncompromising empowerment of these women. Just for a moment, just for a sentence, it would feel like the book had gone back to mocking and belittling the characters. And it didn't feel whimsical or affectionate, it just felt mean and malicious. It wasn't explained or justified, it just happened. These may have been jokes that were misjudged, or that I just took in the wrong way, but the more I think about it, the more I've started thinking that it might be deliberate. Despite these women being the heroes of the story, despite them having shown degrees of courage and shrewdness that goes above and beyond what you could expect from anyone, they are still mocked for some of their feminine traits. Mocked by the very book in which they are the heroes. Regardless of whether I'm reading too much into this, it was jarring and uncomfortable. At the time it felt out of place, but on reflection it kind of feels appropriate.

By necessity there is a plot surrounding these wonderful characters and their journey, and the plot is absolutely ludicrous. This could have turned out to be all right and work well in a book which conceptually sets out to be over the top, ridiculous, and absurd, and I appreciate that the absurdity of the overarching plot is probably a device which is intended to amplify the many absurd elements within it, but it really didn't work for me. There are only so many contrivances and wink-wink self-aware clichés I can take in a book, and it's about a third of what was in this one. Granted, there are some excellent sub-plots. There are situations, flashbacks, and scenes which are absolutely brilliantly done, at times laugh-out-loud funny, at times sad, and at times just really moving. But it's all packed into a main plot that starts out being corny, transitions into the absurd, and then just disintegrates and ends up being so all over the place that I stopped caring about it entirely. That's not to say the book is bad, not at all, there are regular sections of more or less polished gold throughout it, I just became very bored when making my way between the parts of the story that actually had a point to them.

I was also left with a feeling that the sexism exhibited by some of the characters in this book is passed over too quickly and generously. Most of the characters who employ sexism as a weapon, belittling and patronising the women as tactical power-plays to further their own cause, are portrayed either as evil idiots who have done so out of malice, or as well-meaning idiots who have done so out of ignorance. I think the book could have made this particular issue a little less cut and dry. While institutional and unconscious sexism are almost constant undertones in the book, they aren't hammered home in the same way as pretty much everything else in this book is. The world which is portrayed in the book is so caricatured that the discrimination and objectification of women is wholly overt. I think this makes it too easy for a certain kind of reader to miss the point entirely, and to be able to come away from the book thinking "well, I'm glad that we don't live in a world like that!"
Or, to put it another way, the people for whom this book should be the most uncomfortable would easily be able to discard it as a story set in some dystopia rather than see it for what it really is, an exaggerated, but in many ways accurate, version of the world we actually live in.

I would recommend this book, but I'd recommend it on the basis of it being philosophically interesting and occasionally thought-provoking. From an entertainment point of view I think it could have been more… entertaining. From a political point of view I'm just not convinced that it would strike the chord it should be striking in the people for whom that particular chord desperately needs to be struck.

[nannah]

DNF @14%

Just couldn't do it, I'm sorry.
Yeah, I know it's satire, but it should at least be well-written satire. This isn't. Not even close. I'm not going to waste my time with this.

Basically from what I read, a plane full of pageant girls crashes on an island, and they need to find a way to survive.

Right from the get-go (the very first page of the very first chapter) we have some lovely ableist language (just so everyone knows, using "bipolar" as an adjective is not something you should do, okay?). A great first impression.

The humor is something I or my friends might've written in middle school, maybe? And even then, only enjoyed because we were the ones who wrote them. Every "humorous" line made me cringe and tense so much I'm 10x more achy than I should be (even with fibromyalgia). Take a look at some of these:

"'I got my Scouting Badge in First Aid!'"
'Ohmigosh, me too!' Tiara threw her arms around Brittani. 'You're so nice. If it's not me, I hope you win.'
'No, I hope YOU win!'"

"'Ohmigosh. No food at all.' [. . .] 'I am going to be so superskinny by pageant time!'"

"'Miss Teen Dreamers, we can't leave this body here. It will attract predators,' Taylor said.
'You mean like those guys who NetChat you and pretend they're a hot German pop star named Hans but who turn out to be some old fat guy in a house in Kansas?'"

'"Um, does that ocean look kind of high to you?'
'How can the ocean get high? It can't inhale.'"

And these are just from the first 14% of the book. It's ridiculous and . . . not that funny, satire or not. I feel like this might be a good fit for those who love to mock teenage girls or for girls who love to say "I'm not like all the other girls" on repeat for their whole lives.

There's also a heavy dose of fatphobia, because how could there not be? (/sarcasm)
One of the girls tells a story about how her friend """ballooned""" up to size six and how it ruined that friend's life. Again, I literally don't care about "the message" behind this. It's a young adult book mocking fat people in its dialogue. Even if it's mocking its own protagonists, young adults are reading this text.

There's also a lovely bit where a white girl finds the only African American contestant and thinks she's somehow a "native" of the island they're stranded on and loudly says, "Hello, we need help. Is your village close?" and when the girl says she's actually from Colorado, another one is like "We have a Colorado where we're from, too!" and does a mocking Hawaiian greeting for some damn racist reason, ignoring her again when the black girl tries to tell them she's American.

There's also a girl with a tray literally smashed into her forehead, and the solution these girls come up with is "Oh, maybe you should get bangs! No one would notice! 3"

It's sooooo difficult to get through, and not enjoyable in the least because the humor is so headache-inducing. I just can't give it a chance.

[Nessa Luna]

Actual rating: 4,5. I bought this book back in May last year, because I wanted a nice summer-y read for the upcoming summer. I then read a couple of pages, and put the book back on my shelf. I promised myself many times that I would pick up the book and read it, but I never did, until now. And now that I have finished the book, I wonder why the hell I waited this long.

Beauty Queens tells the story of fifty Pageant contestants, whose plane crashes in the middle of a deserted island. The survivors must try to survive in this jungle, until help comes. If help comes at all. I honestly really loved the concept of beauty pageant contestants stranded on an island with no help, no hair curlers and hardly any make-up at all!

I think the reason I put it on hold for so long, was Taylor. She was so annoying in the beginning of the story in my opinion, and I really had no patience for a character like that to be honest. But as the story went on, she kind of grew on me, and I have to say in the end I actually liked her character. As for the others, there was a lot of diversity and I really liked that. My favourite character, out of all of them, has got to be Jennifer. Partly because she loved comics so much and yeah I love it when there's a comic-loving character in a story. One thing I did find annoying, was that sometimes the characters kept on being named as their states, like 'Miss Texas' for example. It got really confusing at some points, and I really wished they had just kept to their actual names.

This book was written in such a humouristic and sarcastic way, I honestly loved it so much. It was making fun of so many things and everything was just so over the top sometimes, and that is honestly my kind of humour (that and sadistic humour). I honestly loved the writing, and I really do plan on picking up more of Libba Bray's books. I loved all the little annotations that were made in the story and how it looked as if the Corporation had written the book, similar to Illuminae, but then with more story than actual files. I definitely live for these kind of books!

At the end, it got so thrilling, that I really didn't want to put the book down, and I think I finished the last 150 or so pages in one whole evening. I can definitely say Beauty Queens belongs on the list of my favourite reads this year, and I am still hitting myself for waiting this long to read it.

If you love stories about plane crashes and a group of people trying to survive in harsh circumstances (like Lord of the Flies), and especially if you love sarcastic stories that take the piss out of things, definitely definitely pick up Beauty Queens by Libba Bray!

My opinion in one gif:

[empressbrooke]

At first I thought I wasn't really in the mood for this book, which starts off with a bunch of vapid pageant girls crash landing on an island and doing a remarkably terrible job of fending for themselves. But then, cut off from the rest of society, they start to reflect on the bullshit expectations that are heaped on women and become more comfortable being who they really want to be. The overall tone is cheesy and over the top, but I was completely charmed. And while a lesser author may have skipped over the chance for an intersectional look at bullshit expectations women face, Libba Bray includes two girls of color, a deaf girl, a lesbian girl, a bisexual girl, and a trans girl. By the end of the book I was a bit verklempt with the little peeks into the future about how they all continued being awesome. Recommended for anyone who is a woman or knows a woman.

[vagasker]

I think this is the weirdest book I've ever read.. I applaud you Libba Bray for coming up with the most insane ideas. Don't get me wrong though, I really enjoyed this book! It shows some really girly girls who can kick-ass and I'm always there for that trope!

[Stephanie]

This was my first go with an audiobook. I've been very apprehensive towards audiobooks for a while, mostly because I would get flashbacks from high school when teachers would just pop in an audiobook, and we would have to follow along with the book. It was boring, but at least I didn't have to go through all the stress of getting called on to read out loud. Also, I felt like it wasn't really reading.

But! I'm so glad I choose Beauty Queens as my first audiobook, because I loved it. I'm usually by myself at my other part time job, so I figured listening to an audiobook would help pass the time. It definitely helped, and I'm sad that I just now got into audiobooks, because now I won't be by myself at work and can't listen to them anymore.

I loved Libba Bray's narration. I loved all her accents for all the different characters, it really helped keep all the characters straight, since there were quite a few of them. I also loved all the little fun stuff thrown in there, like how the footnotes were handled and the commercial breaks. None of the audiobooks from high school were this fun, that's for sure.

About the story, I was kind of unsure of this book. I LOVED Libba Bray's A Great and Terrible Beauty series, but this book seemed a little out there and completely different, which it is, but I really liked it! I was laughing out loud at some parts, and I loved all the girl power going on. Libba Bray was definitely trying to get a message across with this book, and I think she did an awesome job with it.

I definitely recommend this audiobook to people who want to try out audiobooks for the first time. It's a lot of fun, with a great story. Now I want to buy a physical copy for my shelf.

[violetpeanut]

Snarky, hilarious satire. I loved this.