Beauty Queens

March 21, 2011
Bray follows her Printz Awardâwinner, Going Bovine, with an only slightly less absurd premise in this out-there satire about a planeload of teen beauty queens who crash onto a (not so) deserted island. Lord of the Flies with an evening gown competition, anyone? Led by the indefatigable Miss Texas, Taylor Rene Krystal Hawkins, the 14 surviving contestants must rely on competitive moxie. Despite the large cast, Bray makes the Misses distinctive, though each is more a stand-in for a particular brand of diversity than a fully dimensional teenager (one's black, one's deaf, one's gay, one is a boy in the process of becoming a girl). Poor Miss New Mexico stands out because she has a serving tray embedded in her forehead. ("Bangs are the new black!") Halfway through the ordeal, a boat full of shirtless, reality TV pirates runs aground, allowing for some smoking hot scenes. Fun footnotes, contestant profiles, and scripted commercial breaks are interspersed. There's a lot of message, but every time the story veers toward sermonizing, Bray corrects with another crack about our media-saturated, appearance-obsessed, consumer-driven society. Ages 13âup.

July 1, 2012
The premise of Bray's uproariously funny and sharply observant novel is this: on their way to the Miss Teen Dream competition, a planeload of beauty pageant contestants crashes on what appears to be a deserted island. While the surviving Teen Dreamers valiantly cope with the basics (finding food, water, and shelter; practicing their pageant skills), they become pawns in a massive global conspiracy involving a rogue former Miss Teen Dream winner; a megalomaniacal dictator; and a Big Brother-ish pageant sponsor, The Corporation. The scope of the plot is mind-boggling, the list of characters is dauntingly long, and many of the plot turns require much suspension of disbelief, but Bray's tour-de-force audio performance sparkles with the reflected light of a million sequined gowns. Her distinct and lovingly caricatured voices for the many over-the-top characters, chirpy footnotes, and sanitized Corporation messages and commercial breaks enhance the experience of the book. Bray's quieter message about the power unleashed when teenage girls think society isn't watching carries more weight when Bray herself gives those girls voices. Also, when Tina Fey decides she's tired of parodying Sarah Palin, someone should give Libba Bray a call. kitty flynn

(Copyright 2012 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)