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Harsh Sharma harshdshar3a4f — (Note: This is a long review. Also, it starts with a tangent. Bear with me here.) If you ask me, the best show on TV is Modern Family. I love it. It's hilarious. And I can identify what makes it funny: 1) Excellent writers. They take elements of reality that people have to deal with day-to-day and turn them into something hilarious. Successfully. 2) They understand the line between funny and obnoxious. For the most part, they manage to stay on the side of funny, without crossing over so that the joke becomes something that causes eye rolls instead of laughter. 3) There's no laugh track. You decide what deserves a laugh without having to be prompted into thinking something lame is funny. Why am I mentioning this? Because it's a pinpoint of what Libba Bray does wrong with Beauty Queens. Libba Bray can be funny. Libba Bray can be clever. I read her Goodreads bio and some of Going Bovine (which, even though I detested, I can still say it had its moments of hilarity). Her mistake here is realizing it. In doing this, she gets cocky. She starts thinking she's funny and that everything she said with the intention of making you laugh is automatically golden and therefore hilarious. Pride goeth before the fall. Or something. Doesn't matter. Beauty Queens isn't funny. I smiled once. Not an exaggeration. I found this book to be obnoxious. It has the elements of reality (commercialism) down, but instead of turning it into something humorous, it just made me roll my eyes. I guess it's called satire. But this seemed to be laying it on a little bit too thick. And the entire time, you can practically feel the book smiling self-indulgently at you, like 'aren't-I-clever'. You know how in sitcoms, there's that pause in between every line of a conversation while the laugh track plays, like the actors are waiting for the audience to contain their laughter over a joke that wasn't even funny? That's how Beauty Queens felt for most of the book. Except I wasn't laughing. You know why? Because calling the Backstreet Boys (or the Jonas Brothers or Justin Bieber or whatever) Boyz Will B Boyz is not clever. Renaming every flaw in our country's commercialistic society is not clever. Anyone can do that. What you do with it, that's what makes it funny. But what Libba Bray does with it... isn't. It's all pointed, like here, think for yourself, but let me tell you what I think about all this. It becomes preachy. One example: "Sexuality is not meant to be this way--an honest, consensual experience in which a girl might take an active role when she feels good and ready and not one minute before. No. Sexual desire is meant to sell soap. And cars. And beer. And religion". She does this about everything. Unless you're an idiot (like one of her characters) you'll be able to figure out that she's saying the opposite. So all that's here is preaching thinly disguised by so-called 'satire'. It's not amusing, and because she's essentially telling me everything I need to know, it doesn't inspire me to think for myself. So a double fail. So, no, Beauty Queens, you are an obnoxious girl who thinks she's funny, but is severely disillusioned. Sorry, darling. I might be able to forgive that, sort of. If the storyline and/or the characters were any better, there is the possibility that all would not be lost here. Something good might come from this waste of four hundred pages. However, Beauty Queens is pretty much a disaster. It's about beauty pageant contestants shipwrecked on an island. Doesn't that sound awesome? Like, it could be amazing, exciting and hilarious. But... it isn't. It's not really exciting, because the entire thing is treated like a joke rather than a survival story, and there's never a sense of urgency. And its main source of hilarity comes from its 'satire', which, as I already explained, is not funny. And the characters here stop it from being amazing. There are twelve girls (I think), which means twelve characters we have to be able to distinguish and tell apart from one another, which is a difficult task, especially when they're referred to as 'Miss State Name' a lot. Mostly, it doesn't matter, we just gotta remember the stereotypes represented here. And those are... -the Black Girl -the Indian Girl -the Ditz (x2) -the Lesbian -the Transgender -the Slut -the Disabled Girl -the Goody Two Shoes (x2, or maybe 3) -the One Who's Better Than All of Them, So Screw You, B******! Yeah... it's gonna take a miracle worker to pull each and every one of these into a substantial, developed character. And Libba Bray is far from a miracle worker. In presenting all these characters, there's an oppurtunity to raise some questions, make readers think. Unfortunately, Libba Bray decides to fill in the blanks for us yet again. Take the transgender character as an example. That raises the gender identity issue. What makes a girl a girl/boy a boy (other than the obvious)? There's a lot she could do, in answering this one. This could lead to making the reader think about the differences between guys and girls, how our minds work differently, in what ways, etc... You could get pretty insightful with this. The answer Libba Bray gives us: 'well, I like wearing dresses and looking pretty, so obviously, I'm a girl'. Yeah. So according to Libba Bray, womanhood can be boiled down to a desire to wear frilly dresses and makeup. No, there is so much more; to leave it at this is stereotyping. Wanting to look pretty might be part of it, but there has to be a bigger reason for his decision to become a girl than that. The point is, she has tons of issues sitting on the table here, but she doesn't ever do anything with any of them. The characters are names, with their issues, and they go about the island melting down jewelry into spears and doing other cute, cliched, gimmicky things you might see on a cartoon on Nickelodeon. This book in itself is something of a joke; it's supposed to be. But when the characters can't take their own situation seriously, neither can you. And that stops this book from being meaningful. Also, at one point one girl comes across the realization that sex before marriage is perfectly fine and hers to give and whatever, yay her!! However, in doing so, she also slams down girls who believe otherwise. She also portrays all of her characters in a semi-flattering light (they're not supposed to be flat-out awful), except for any of them who are supposedly 'religious'. They're viewed as close minded and bothersome, total and complete... well you know. At one point, she has the lesbian talking about how her grandma told her that 'God hates gay people' or something like that. As a Christian, I find that extremely offensive. If you truly believe that God is who he says he is, you will know that God is love, and does not hate GLTB people. You can debate the morality of it all you want; God loves them the same way he loves anyone else. To say that God hates them all portrays God and those who follow him in a most unflattering light. Always find it interesting how there's a need to make all sexualities, ethnicities and religions wonderful, EXCEPT Christianity, which must be constantly slammed. Discrimination is bad, bad, bad unless it's against Christians or Republicans, in which case, mess with them all you want. Disgusting. And while we're here, what's with the Sarah Palin dissing anyway? I don't know enough about Sarah Palin to be for or against her, and honestly, I doubt anyone else my age does either. So an entire character is wasted on its intended audience. And in a few years, no one will remember who she is, so that's majorly shortening the shelf-life of Beauty Queens. Sadly, despite the highly original premise and most amazing cover, Beauty Queens is reduced to nothing but anti-commercialism and self-promotion. These are both good things, but there's nothing here that can't be gleaned from your average Lady GaGa song.

Rion Holland rionholland — excellent

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Kinomi Fujino kinomifujino — Good Reading