In Which You Cannot Take Our Pretty
Sep. 2nd, 2012 02:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileErr, so I finished reading this book over a week ago. And have not written anything about it because I have been busy with moving and also I has no brain. But I will try to give you what passes for my thoughts on it!
The book in question is Libba Bray's Beauty Queens, which is about a plane full of teenage beauty pageant contestants who crash on a desert island. No, seriously. Well, maybe "seriously" would be pushing it; the book certainly deals with a lot of serious topics, but it does it in a hilariously gooftastic way, thus proving once again that people who complain about feminists having no sense of humor are just feeling threatened.
Anyway, the setup is as thus: The Miss Teen Dream pageant is run by a corporation known as The Corporation. As far as we can tell, The Corporation produces beauty products, entertainment and what-passes-for-news media, and illegal weaponry. The plane carrying the contestants for the pageant crashes on a desert island upon which there is a secret Corporation base, where they do Nefarious Corporation type things like test products on the local wildlife, exploit the indigenous population to extinction, make exploding jars of Lady 'Stache Off (a hair removal cream), and broker illegal arms deals with genocidal pseudocommunist dictator Momo B. ChaCha of the Republic of ChaCha, who is hopelessly in love with Presidential hopeful/former Miss Teen Dream/Sarah Palin parody figure Ladybird Hope.
Many of the contestants die in the initial crash, but our core cast of beauty queens includes: an aspiring investigative journalist/undercover reporter/cranky feminist; a transgendered contestant who used to be a member of a hugely popular and widely mocked pop/emo/corporate boy band called, ironically, "Boyz Will B Boyz"; an African-American girl and an Indian girl who start off as rivals because everyone knows (but nobody says) that only one "ethnic" contestant can ever place (but never win); a deaf girl who is starting to get sick of the expectation that she be all chipper and inspirational and shit about her disability; a lower-class contestant who placed into the pageant through a program for at-risk youth; a girl who has been doing pageants since she was two weeks old because her parents assigned it to her as "her dream" and then spent years putting guilt trips on her for all they'd sacrificed so "she" could follow "her dream," and who is woefully undereducated about everything else; a "wild girl"; and a Miss Texas who is like, the embodiment of all wacky stereotypes about femmes-with-guns bitchy fabulous Texan women, and who really, really, really believes in all the peppy Teen Dream rhetoric.
The girls put all of their wacky over-accomplished extra-curricular skills together and end up building a ludicrously pretty, functional, eco-friendly village as they wait for rescue. Rescue does not come. There are some sketchy incidents with the shady Corporation people that the girls do not know are there. There are some weird power plays as some of the girls ditch the expectations of femininity and other expected behaviors faster than others. There is some eating of bugs. About halfway through the book the cast of Captains Bodacious IV: Badder and More Bodaciouser, a reality TV show about fake rock-star pirates, also crashes on the island in their pirate ship that none of them can actually row, and REALLY wacky hijinks ensue. There are lots of jokes about maxi pads, because apparently Libba Bray really likes writing about maxi pads.
This book has periodic commercial breaks for hilariously fake products, many of which end up being used in the story itself, such as Lady 'Stache Off.
The girls are finally "rescued," in that The Corporation decides to use them in part of an elaborate plan to get Ladybird Hope elected President and then start a war with the Republic of ChaCha and open malls there. The girls learn about the plan, which involves them tragically dying, and have to develop their own plan to fuck it up and not die, and I will not tell you how this goes down but it is all pretty awesome.
Anti-corporate, pro-social-justice, full of sequins and things exploding... this book is totally awesome.
PS I kind of want to be Libba Bray when I grow up.
The book in question is Libba Bray's Beauty Queens, which is about a plane full of teenage beauty pageant contestants who crash on a desert island. No, seriously. Well, maybe "seriously" would be pushing it; the book certainly deals with a lot of serious topics, but it does it in a hilariously gooftastic way, thus proving once again that people who complain about feminists having no sense of humor are just feeling threatened.
Anyway, the setup is as thus: The Miss Teen Dream pageant is run by a corporation known as The Corporation. As far as we can tell, The Corporation produces beauty products, entertainment and what-passes-for-news media, and illegal weaponry. The plane carrying the contestants for the pageant crashes on a desert island upon which there is a secret Corporation base, where they do Nefarious Corporation type things like test products on the local wildlife, exploit the indigenous population to extinction, make exploding jars of Lady 'Stache Off (a hair removal cream), and broker illegal arms deals with genocidal pseudocommunist dictator Momo B. ChaCha of the Republic of ChaCha, who is hopelessly in love with Presidential hopeful/former Miss Teen Dream/Sarah Palin parody figure Ladybird Hope.
Many of the contestants die in the initial crash, but our core cast of beauty queens includes: an aspiring investigative journalist/undercover reporter/cranky feminist; a transgendered contestant who used to be a member of a hugely popular and widely mocked pop/emo/corporate boy band called, ironically, "Boyz Will B Boyz"; an African-American girl and an Indian girl who start off as rivals because everyone knows (but nobody says) that only one "ethnic" contestant can ever place (but never win); a deaf girl who is starting to get sick of the expectation that she be all chipper and inspirational and shit about her disability; a lower-class contestant who placed into the pageant through a program for at-risk youth; a girl who has been doing pageants since she was two weeks old because her parents assigned it to her as "her dream" and then spent years putting guilt trips on her for all they'd sacrificed so "she" could follow "her dream," and who is woefully undereducated about everything else; a "wild girl"; and a Miss Texas who is like, the embodiment of all wacky stereotypes about femmes-with-guns bitchy fabulous Texan women, and who really, really, really believes in all the peppy Teen Dream rhetoric.
The girls put all of their wacky over-accomplished extra-curricular skills together and end up building a ludicrously pretty, functional, eco-friendly village as they wait for rescue. Rescue does not come. There are some sketchy incidents with the shady Corporation people that the girls do not know are there. There are some weird power plays as some of the girls ditch the expectations of femininity and other expected behaviors faster than others. There is some eating of bugs. About halfway through the book the cast of Captains Bodacious IV: Badder and More Bodaciouser, a reality TV show about fake rock-star pirates, also crashes on the island in their pirate ship that none of them can actually row, and REALLY wacky hijinks ensue. There are lots of jokes about maxi pads, because apparently Libba Bray really likes writing about maxi pads.
This book has periodic commercial breaks for hilariously fake products, many of which end up being used in the story itself, such as Lady 'Stache Off.
The girls are finally "rescued," in that The Corporation decides to use them in part of an elaborate plan to get Ladybird Hope elected President and then start a war with the Republic of ChaCha and open malls there. The girls learn about the plan, which involves them tragically dying, and have to develop their own plan to fuck it up and not die, and I will not tell you how this goes down but it is all pretty awesome.
Anti-corporate, pro-social-justice, full of sequins and things exploding... this book is totally awesome.
PS I kind of want to be Libba Bray when I grow up.
