I can’t believe it took me so long to read this wonderful book by Libba Bray. A friend of mine recommended it to me several years ago, but the only book of Bray’s I had read at that point was A Great Terrible Beauty, and I thought it was only OK, so I wasn’t exactly jumping at the chance to read her next book.
Then I read her Diviners series and loved it, so when I came across a copy of this book in one of my local Little Free Libraries, I decided to give it a chance. I had just finished The Wonders of the Invisible World, so I was in the mood for something fun.
This book did not disappoint. It’s fun, hilarious, and so, so smart!
The premise is that a plane full of teenaged beauty pageant contestants crashed on a not-so-deserted island on its way to deliver the Miss Teen Dreamers to an exotic location to film a promotional video for the pageant, which has been suffering in the ratings lately.
All of the adults and most of the contestants are killed in the crash, with only about 13 beautiful teenaged girls left alive. The book first focuses on Adina (a.k.a. Miss New Hampshire), who is completely disgusted by the pageant and everything for which it stands. She entered the pageant because her parents promised her a drum set for her band if she won, but she also wants to take down the pageant from the inside.
Adina and Mary Lou stumble out of the wreckage of the plane crash and towards the sound of a teenaged girl calling everyone over to the beach and trying to get their attention.
Krystal Rene Hawkins (a.k. a. Miss Texas) loses no time establishing herself as the leader of the group, and when Adina tries to make her case for being leader, they all take a vote and Krystal wins in a landslide.
Krystal splits them up into two groups, one to help the wounded on the beach and another to go back to the plane crash to look for other survivors. When they regroup on the beach, Adina says they should forage for food, clean water, and shelter, but Krystal insists they’ll be rescued soon so their time would be better spent practicing their routines for the pageant, so that’s what they do.
As it turns out, not only is no one coming to rescue them, but the whole crash was arranged as an excuse for America to go to war with the diplomat of some tiny, third-world country. The not-so-deserted island on which the girls are stranded also happens to be home base for a secret operation run by The Corporation, which is currently arranging to sell weapons to the dictator of the third-world country, even though America has an embargo against the country because of all the human rights violations.
The Corporation wants to sell weapons to the dictator in exchange for building and running a factory in his country and using his super-cheap labor to make their products, which apparently include everything from military-grade weapons to make-up. And when The Corporation has a few months of low profits (or no profits), they fire millions of workers with only one week’s worth of severance and no benefits, while the CEO who caused all the trouble is fired with a severance package of tens of millions of dollars, plus a yacht. Oh, and the screw-up son of the screw-up CEO gets a job at The Corporation, so if you think a big part of this book is a not-so-subtle commentary on American capitalism, you’d be right.
I love this book because it’s constantly making fun of beauty pageants and America’s obsession with feminine beauty without making fun of the contestants. You have Adina, the hardcore feminist, Petra, who’s transgender, Sosie, who’s deaf and bisexual, Jennifer, who’s a lesbian, Nicole, the one black girl, and Shanti, the one Indian American (and, yes, there are discussions of how racist pageant culture is, in addition to being incredibly sexist). You do have a couple contestants who are more like what you’d expect a beauty pageant contestant to be: beautiful, obsessed with being beautiful, and not very bright. But as the girls learn to survive on the island alone (not realizing there’s a huge Corporation compound just on the other side of the island), even the not-so-bright girls get absorbed into the group and taught all kinds of things no one bothered to teach them because why teach a girl who’s so pretty?
Not only do the girls learn to survive on the island, they learn to thrive. They build huts, they build fishing nets and cook fish using plane parts, they come up with a way to collect and store rainwater. They’re incredibly smart and resourceful and The Corporation finds out too late that they really don’t want to mess with Miss Teen Dreamers.
I loved this book so much and laughed out loud at many parts. I can’t believe it took me so long to read such a delightful book.