Beauty Queens by Libba Bray

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Beauty Queens
by Libba Bray

One of the books that I read this week was Libba Bray’s weird, hilarious satirical novel, Beauty Queens.  The book takes place on what at first glimpse appears to be a deserted island, where a plane carrying the contestants and film crew of the Miss Teen Dream beauty pageant has crash landed. 13 Miss Teen Dream Pageant contestants are the only living survivors of the crash, and they must work together to try to find food and shelter until they can be rescued. The book’s narrator keeps changing focus on various characters, and as the book unfolds, we learn the backstory of several of the survivors.  One of the things that surprised me reading this book was how well Bray was able to flesh out what first appear to be stock beauty queen bimbos.  Little by little we get to know Adina, Taylor, Nicole, Shanti, Mary Lou, Jennifer, Sosie, Petra, and Tiara, but honestly, the large cast of characters makes it somewhat daunting to juggle that many main characters.  I think the book would lend itself well to re-reading, since in some of the earlier chapters, readers haven’t yet learned to tell apart the different characters, who are sometimes simply introduced as Miss New Hampshire, or Miss Ohio.  By the end of the book, we know much more about these girls than we did in the first few chapters. Bray’s book begins with Adina as the most sympathetic character, since her cynical investigative journalism background provides the reader an outsider’s perspective on the beauty pageant world.  Adina, we learn, had entered the competition to bring it crumbling from within. If any one voice sticks out among the many offered, it would be Adina’s.

But as the book unfolds, we are introduced to the perspectives, goals, and histories of the other contestants, and as they work together to fight for survival, they develop a true camaraderie and a strength and resilience none of them knew they had. Petra, we learn, is a transgender teen who is in the completion to earn the money for surgery, since her mother’s expensive cancer treatments ate up any possibility for them to afford Petra’s surgery cost. Most of the characters have interesting backstories, such as Mary Lou’s family curse of wild women, and the readers root for them individually and as a group.

Bray is not afraid to explore issues like gender roles, capitalism, reality tv, product placement, feminism and femininity, racism, classism, and ecology, but she does so in an absurdist, over-the-top farce.  The tone of the book is hilariously camp, as the girls discover a strange Machiavellian plot with presidential aspirations, illegal arms trade, a ruthless 3rd world dictator, a ship full of pirates, a secret volcano lair, and an indigenous ornithologist.  Just about the time you think things can’t get any weirder, Bray introduces something else into the mix that just makes the reader laugh out loud.  The chapters are sometimes interspersed with crazy commercials and pageant fact sheets filled out by some of the contestants. I really enjoyed this book, much more than I was expecting.