Review: Beauty Queens by Libba Bray

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, which to be honest was a little unexpected. I have been so unfortunate to read a lot of books I didn’t really like lately, and I was afraid this would be another one, but I was happily surprised. I mean, it’s not stellar, but I enjoyed it more than so many other books. 

I assumed this would be a book about the girls of a beauty pageant and their trials within this pageant. And it was! Kind of. But it was so much more than that too!

It starts with the plane carrying the girls crashing on a desert island. Now they have to learn how to survive on the island using only their very mixed skills and whatever they can salvage from their luggage of beauty supplies and evening gowns. The reader, however, soon finds out that they are not alone on the island. There is a super secret compound manned by soldiers and scientists working for The Corporation. The very same corporation that sponsors the beauty pageant. Secret and shady things are going on on the island, and the soldiers decide to leave the girls to starve to death, because they can’t risk the attention a rescue mission would bring to the island. However, the girls turn out to be more capable than anyone thought, and they survive. 

There is a lot more to the story than the above description, but I don’t want to give too much away. 

The narrative of the girls’ battle for survival is interspersed with “commercials” and footnotes and commentary from “The Corporation”, and all of this give us a feeling of what this corporation is really like, and what is happening elsewhere. I quite liked these inserts. I hate footnotes in general, but these were just fun, short tidbits and there weren’t too many of them to be annoying. 

The point of view of the story changes quite often, but I never found it confusing, as it always stated clearly at the very start, whose POV we were reading from. I did get a little confused trying to distinguish between the girls though. There are a lot of them and only about half of them really get fleshed out, while the rest pretty much just blend together. But they weren’t really instrumental to the story, so it didn't matter that much. 

In general there were a lot of characters and especially the later additions to the cast didn’t get fleshed out too much, but seemed more like set pieces brought in for the sake of the story line. 

The story line itself was absolutely crazy! But in a fun way. You have to be ready to believe in crazy coincidences, insane strokes of luck, good or bad, and not question it all too much. The plot is quite fast paced, and sometimes it can feel a little too fast, and you have to hang on tight to keep up with all the plot twists and unlikely events taking place. But if you don’t take anything too seriously, you should enjoy this book as much as I did. 

I gave it 3 stars out of 5 on Goodreads.