Libba Bray has written a series of books that my daughter loves: A Great and Terrible Beauty, Rebel Angels, and The Sweet Far Thing. She keeps telling me that I MUST read them, but I just haven't gotten to them yet. However, we were at Barnes and Noble and saw Beauty Queens, also by Libba Bray, and I just had to give it a try. I confess, "Toddlers and Tiaras" is one of my guilty pleasures!
The story begins with the 50 contestants of the Miss Teen Dream Pageant crash landing on a deserted island in the middle of nowhere. Unlike Ginger on "Gilligan's Island", their evening gowns and makeup cases do not survive intact. So what are the surviving plucked and spray tanned Miss Teen Dreamers to do??? Some want to keep practicing their routines for the upcoming pageant, others want to focus on survival. And Miss New Mexico has an airplane food tray stuck in her forehead. A menacing volcano, strange totems, mutant snakes and a wayward pirate ship make for not your run-of-the-mill castaway story.
Part spy thriller, part political commentary, part Disney Channel comedy and part cautionary tale, the book was lots of what I expected, and a lot of what I didn't. We found it in the young adult section, but some of the themes a quite mature. I probably wouldn't let a young teenager read it. But that's just me. You read it and decide!
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