Review: Beauty Queens by Libba Bray

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 compete 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 eyeliner. 

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.


I decided to check this book out because of the cover. It interested me since I could already get a sense of what this book was going to be about: beauty queens surviving. It sounded interesting so I bought it. I really enjoyed this book, it was very amusing and cute. The humor in this is very different from what I would normally enjoy. I think it's a very sarcastic type of humor with a bit of mockery. There were a lot of shocking moments and twists. Some people would say it was overdone and that made it  frustrating and annoying. Personally, I think it was purposely done that way to add more to the humor. While I enjoyed this book, there were times when it was slow or the characters annoyed me. It was a very light read and while it wasn't amazing it still kept me interested. 


Rating: 4/5
Released: June 2011
Publisher: Scholastic Press
Format: Hardcover; 400 pages