Tolog Review: Beauty Queens

Beauty Queens
by Libba Bray
reviewed by Briana Escobar 

In this day and age, finding entertainment that rightfully represents numerous diverse groups of people is hard to come by. Bray does a spectacular job of including several diverse characters in her novel, Beauty Queens. This remarkable novel follows the lives of girls entering a beauty pageant. However, on their way to the destination of the pageant, their plane crashes on a deserted island where the girls are left with no food, water, shelter, or adults. This group of 50 teenage girls, or, more accurately, however many survive the crash, has to work together to survive and be rescued. 

Bray uses tasteful satire throughout the novel to express the many unfair stereotypes forced on women. For example, her striking comment on the double standards on a woman’s expression of her sexuality, “Sexuality is not meant to be this way - an honest, consensual expression 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” (Bray, 178). Anyone who identifies as a woman reading this book is able to relate to this image. Readers are able to recognize the disgusting sexual objectification of women in advertisement, and seeing a strong woman such as Bray shedding light on the subject makes readers feel empowered. 

However, the brilliant ways that Bray stands up to society through literature doesn’t stop there. The outstanding idea of having beauty pageant girls expressing feminist themes absolutely demolishes the age-old negative stereotypes of feminists. One of the hardest struggles women face in today’s society are the constant, barraging stereotypes, and the characters feel the weight of the struggle in this book as well. “The world expected girls to pluck and primp and put on heels. Meanwhile, boys dressed in rumpled T-shirts and baggy pants and misplace their combs, and yet you were supposed to fall at their feet? Unacceptable” (Bray, 205). Libba Bray analyzes that perhaps to get women to find themselves and become the empowered women we all deserve to be, perhaps they have to get lost.