It explicitly calls out and questions harmful beauty standards and ideas of feminine comportment that are baked into beauty pageantry. Beauty Queens is ultimately very much a rah-rah book of female empowerment (and I mean this in a good way). Reading this book a decade after its publication leaves me reflecting on how much the world has changed since Bray wrote at the start of the 2010s. They’ll need more than the skills they profess for the talent part of the competition to survive, escape, and reveal the Corporation’s treachery to the world. As the days pass with no rescue, however, strange events reveal that maybe these girls aren’t alone on this island. At first, the challenge seems to be surviving long enough to be rescued-although if some Teen Dreamers have their way, they will also somehow practise for the pageant at the same time. The fifty contestants for Miss Team Dream crash land on a deserted island (or is it?). Yet I also think it has a lot of limitations, some due to its age, most due to its construction.

Libba Bray brings a lot of humour and sweetness to these pages. Finally got around to reading it! Beauty Queens is a rollicking young-adult satire of reality television, beauty pageantry, and the corporate hostile takeover of feminism. This might be one of those books where I have had it on my to-read list almost since it came out … eleven years ago.

Beauty Queens by Libba Bray