Beauty Queens by Libba Bray

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
If You Like: Beauty pageant stories, blonde jokes, LOST
Similar to: Lost, Miss Congeniality, Gemma Doyle Trilogy, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Series

I got this book right when it came out expecting it to be another great read by Libba Bray, but I sure was mistaken. The first night I think I read a third of the book, and the whole time I was praying for it to get better. I just have a few things to say about this book.

The book is about a plane full of Miss Teen Dream Beauty Pageant contestents that crash on an unknown island. I thought that sounded like a great idea for a story, and I still think it is, but Libba Bray made a mess of the book by making it seem like a comedy. All of the adults that were on the plane die in the crash, leaving the girls to fend for themselves. At first, the girls divide up into teams to search for other survivors from the plane crash. They spend time making up cute little names for their teams rather than searching for the survivors. One of the girls actually has a tray stuck in her head, but no one (including the girl with the tray in her head) really seems to be alarmed by this. There were also footnotes at the bottom of the page, which I thought were kind of clever at first, but they threw me off because I would lose track of the story when I went to the bottom of the page to read the footnote. I trudged through the entire book just hoping that it would get better at some point. I thought maybe I just wasn't getting into it right away, but would later.

The only reason why I gave this book three stars was because I actually liked some of the girls and the romances they shared. Mary Lou and Adina both reminded me a characters out of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series, and some parts of this book reminded me of the Gemma Doyle Trilogy. Also, this book is really nothing like anything else I've ever read, which is a good thing.

Despite this little hiccup, I think that Libba Bray is an amazing, talented, intelligent writer, and she shows off her writing skills in this book. I guess I just didn't like the way the story was told.