Book Review - Beauty Queens

Yikes. I couldn't finish this. It was just too....satirical.

The 50 girls from a national teenage beauty pageant were flying to a Caribbean island for a photo shoot. Their plane crashed, most of them died, including the pilot and film crew.

I think there are 12? 13? survivors. Anyway, enter heavy satire.

The author was trying to make some point about girls, women, beauty, culture, and society. Like we don't already know how stupid it is to have teenage girls be judged on a national stage in a bikini twirling a baton. No, boys don't have to do this. No, boys don't have to use spray-on tanner or dye their hair. They don't have to get low grades to be liked by their peers.

So, the message is not revolutionary. But it is crammed down the reader's throat with each sentence.  Not a syllable is uttered that doesn't make a girl sound stupid, clueless, or self-absorbed.

But it's a satire, so that's the point, right? Satire is fine, but when it comes at the expense of character development, that I cannot tolerate.

There were the white girls, a black girl, an Indian, a lesbian, a Texan Christian gun lover, and an intelligent one who entered the pageant to destroy it. Not sure how she did that since these national competitions aren't easy to get into. Anyway, no one had any back story, no motivation on why they wanted to win or why they were there in the first place. When they crashed, no one thought of their families or the girls that were killed. The 13 survivors actually voted on continuing to prepare for the pageant instead of working on survival because they'd be rescued soon.

Sorry but what? Even the most selfish, obnoxious teenage girl knows the difference between a luxury and a survival scenario. Yeah, when they have no responsibilities and are hanging out with their friends, they use "like" and "omg" and "what shade of lipstick is that?". But watch them at work or when applying for a job. That irritating inflection in their voice stops and they can speak like adults. Actually teenage girls are much better workers than boys.

And with more than half of them dead before page 1, you can guarantee that would be enough to drop the beauty pageant act and become a real person. For crap's sake, these girls were still wearing their sashes and calling each other Miss Colorado and Miss New Hampshire. Enough already. I just can't read any more.