Review: Beauty Queens by Libba Bray

Title: Beauty Queen
Author: Libba Bray
Publisher: Scholastic
Pub. Date: 5.24.2011
Genre: Contemporary YA
Keywords: Survival, Pageants, Satire, Girl Power, Self Discovery
Pages: 400
Description (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 complete 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 eye liner.

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..


Libba Bray is one of the craziest, off-the-wall writers I've ever experienced. And reading her books is just that - an experience. Bray's novels are always entertaining, but BEAUTY QUEENS took things to whole new level. 


No subject is spared by Bray in the satirical BEAUTY QUEENS... thank goodness. This biting satire calls out the ridiculousness of pop culture, the backwards and shady nature of big corporations, and confronts the idea of beauty and what it means to be a woman.


BEAUTY QUEENS is girl power... not in a cutesy, yay-I'm-a-girl! way, but in a I'm-a-woman-hear-me-roar! way. This book is silly and humorous, but, in the end, it had a serious message. Each of the surviving, stranded beauty queens had something to hide... something that shouldn't have had to be hidden in the first place. There is no checklist for beauty or for being a strong, successful woman and Bray's BEAUTY QUEENS is a testament to that.


BEAUTY QUEENS is a novel I'll definitely be loaning out to the women in my life. It's laugh-out-loud funny, a bit romantic, a bit wild, and a whole lot of kickass. Bray doesn't disappoint.

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If my review wasn't convincing enough, the author gives you plenty of reasons to check out BEAUTY QUEENS:







In addition, Scholastic has launched a new online community called This Is Teen to connect readers with their favorite YA authors and books. Visit their page on Facebook for all the latest news on Libba Bray and her new book Beauty Queens: www.facebook.com/thisisteen.

Review copy provided by Amazon Vine and Big Honcho Media.