Cleaning house - Beauty Queens

Another Young Adult book!

This one is Beauty Queens, by Libba Bray.

I first read Bray's trilogy about girls playing with magic - and then losing control of it - at a boarding school at the close of the nineteenth century. It was a while ago, so I don't think I talked about it (or the later ones?), but I loved the title when I walked by the book one day (A Great and Terrible Beauty) and there were elements that seemed, and were, appealing.

Besides also being about teenage girls, and teenage girls facing up to serious crises, Beauty Queens is totally different, but I still really enjoyed it. This one is about a bunch of beauty pageant contestants stranded on a desert island, and forced to survive on their wits and handiness with a curling iron and homemade tanning beds. Just that premise alone would be funny enough, and Bray is definitely funny. But then she adds on to it a Corporation, with its hand in every pie in America - corporate, political - that needs to take out the teen queens before they ruin its plans to infiltrate a small dictatorship and the rest of America it doesn't yet own.

The overall book isn't quite as hilarious as it thinks it is. The "inserts," fake ads for Corporation products, get to be a little much, and feel a bit like heated over Fforde (then again, even Jasper Fforde re-hashes are still better than a lot of other stuff), but not really a problem. One character, the leader of the pageant pack, is just hilarious, utterly memorable. The character who I think is supposed to be the main character wasn't my favorite, but she has some good moments. What I really liked about the book, puns and lame-awesome jokes aside, is that all of the main characters actually grow and develop, not just one or two. It's really a ensemble piece, and Bray's girls are a strong team. And since they are, of course they thrive and then start kicking some a**.The lessons are kind of predictable, but it doesn't matter; even if we know where we're going, there are some twists along the way, and getting there is fun (secret bad-guy lair in a volcano!).

I'm still waiting to get my hands on Bray's other book, Going Bovine, but so far we're 4 for 4!