Beauty Queens

by Libba Bray
Age group: 13+
Rating: **** (4 stars)
Type: realistic fiction, mystery

The fifty contestants in the Miss Teen Dream Pageant are on their way to the competition, when their plane unexpectedly crash-lands on an uninhabited island covered in tropical plants and animals.
What a way to start the day! Most of the girls die in the crash, and others are wounded. Miss New Mexico even got an airplane tray stuck in her forehead! Finally, Miss Texas, a girl named Taylor Rene Crystal Hawkins takes charge. She idolizes Ladybird Hope, former Miss Teen Dream, and supposedly knows exactly how to run a group of beauty queens abandoned on an island. But even with a leader, the girls don't have much experience in survival skills. Should they be practicing their dance routine or hunting for food? Sunbathing in bikinis or building a shelter? Each girl has their own specific problems, from dealing with transgender-ness to having an obsessive mother to actually hating pageants and just joining so they can ruin it. Not all of them agree and get along, but somehow they have to manage... or else they die!
But not everything is what it seems... MoMo B. ChaCha, president of the Republic of ChaCha, is developing some sort of weapon to destroy The Corporation and... the Miss Teen Dream Contestants! And he may be having an affair with Ladybird Hope! Can the girls manage to get off this island and save themselves and save their world?
This book is really, really funny. For your entertainment, The Corporation provides many ads for their products throughout the book--Lady 'Stache Off, Git R Done, the TV show Patriot Daughters, and the movie Wedding Day 3: Third Time's the Charm--which are exceedingly funny and lighten the mood of the book, even with sinister things happening in the book. Even if this book does have some swear words in it, I definitely recommend it. It shows the bad side of things like beauty pageants. I have heard that the audiobook version of this is very good as well.