Libba Bray - Reviews

Beauty Queens

Description

The Miss Teen Dream pageant, sponsored by The Corporation, embraces the young women of America as the bright and shining lights of the future... to sell innumerable beauty products, pitch TV shows, and monetize invented insecurities while raising the bar of the feminine ideal to ever-more-unattainable heights and placing more and more barriers to their success. This year's fifty contestants are on their way to Hawaii for the big show when their plane goes down, killing the flight crew, several passengers, and the camera crew. The shellshocked survivors face numerous challenges on the strange tropical island where they find themselves: thirst, starvation, tidal waves, giant snakes, hallucinogenic berries, quicksand, and the loss of most of their pageant gowns and accessories... not to mention a top-secret Corporation base under the obligatory volcano, key to a secret plot by Corporation boardmember (and the most famous former Miss Teen Dream in the world) Ladybird Hope for national and world domination via an insane dictator and weaponized beauty products.

Review

This audiobook, narrated by the author, was one of the funniest, sharpest, most unpredictable surprises I've experienced in some time. From the very start, it turns its scathing satiric eye on predatory capitalism, society's impossible expectations for girls, politics, television and reality TV, pop culture, racism and stereotypes, and more in a story that is both an homage to and razor-sharp subversion of numerous tropes and cliches. It's set in a world that's both a funhouse mirror version of our own and eerily, depressingly, and even presciently familiar, especially when reality TV tactics really have been used to co-opt the highest offices in the land by the time I read (or listened, rather); the book was originally published in 2011.
The story kicks off quickly, opening with characters who initially (and deliberately) seem to come straight from the stock bin, but even from the start there are little twists and digs; as bold and brassy hyper-competitor Miss Texas is leading the survivors in a prayer thanking Jesus for saving all of them, the sudden death of Miss Delaware causes her to revise her prayer to saving "some" of them without missing a beat, before insisting that their priority is not to find shelter or food or even devising a way to signal for help, but to keep practicing their pageant routines. As alliances and rivalries form and break, the girls come into their own, all of them suffering under the burdens piled upon them by family, society, and the advertising agencies embodied in the ubiquitous Corporation. Their time on the island is as liberating as it is harrowing, showing them all what they're capable of when they're not under the pageant microscope and turned against each other. When the greater threat becomes apparent, nobody expects them to be able to rise to the challenge... nobody but the girls themselves, who are not who they were before the crash. (Or, rather, they're who they should always have been, but for a world intent on grinding them down to dust.) Periodic footnotes elaborate on celebrities, reality TV shows, products, music, and more, while commercial breaks hilariously skewer ads targeting women and girls with everything from gummy antidepressants for children to animal-shaped maxi pads to keep girls from being cranky during their menstrual cycle and inane movies highlighting ridiculous romantic expectations that undercut women at every turn. I snickered innumerable times while listening even as the action and stakes kept ratcheting up to an explosive finale. The audiobook ended with an interesting (and amusing) author interview.
For getting me to crack a smile more than once at my mind-numbing job (probably to the confusion of co-workers) and for exceeding any expectations I had going in, I'm giving this one top marks... and if you can listen to the audiobook version, I can highly recommend it. Bray's delivery just is the cherry on top of the tale.

The Diviners

The Diviners series, Book 1
Libba Bray
Little, Brown Books
Fiction, YA Fantasy/Historical Fiction/Mystery
Themes: Cross-Genre, Diversity, Ghosts and Spirits, Girl Power, Museums, Occult, Thieves, Religious Themes, Stardom, Urban Tales, Witches
***+

Description

Evangeline "Evie" O'Neill never means to cause trouble... well, not bad trouble. But this time, she's gotten herself in a real pickle: not only did she get herself drunk (illegal, what with Prohibition on), but she let slip a shameful secret about a popular boy in town. She should've known better than to show off her little gift - her ability to glean secrets and memories from objects - but, well, it was a party, and there was alcohol, and it got her the attention she craved. In their small Ohio town, it's a scandal for the ages, and the only way her parents see out of the mess is to ship their wayward teenage daughter off to a bachelor uncle in New York City. This, for Evie, sounds like a dream come true. 1920's New York City is where it's all happening, a city of glitz and glamor, where anybody can become anything. Sure, Uncle Will's a stodgy old stick in the mud, running a dud of a museum dedicated to supernatural curiosities, but Evie's determined to make this city her own, joining in the flapper scene and sneaking out to speakeasies and living life to the fullest. If only she could shake the nightmares about her dead brother... Then the killings start, murders with occult overtones. When Uncle Will is called in as a professional consultant, Evie is plunged into the dark and dangerous side of the city, and a mad cult's prophecy about the end of the world that may be on the verge of coming true.

Review

I had a very mixed reaction to this one. On the plus side, Bray establishes a strong sense of the times and the place, evoking the energy and the slang, as well as the dark undercurrents that resonate to this day (particularly the mutually incompatible ideas of what America is supposed to be, the irrationality of extremism, and the notion of eugenics and other means to "purify" the nation and eliminate "undesirable" or "weak" or "corrupting" elements of society). Evie's a girl of her time and in her moment, embracing the seemingly limitless possibilities of the city that never sleeps in the heyday of the 1920's. She's also rather selfish and somewhat dense and prone to simply not saying important things to draw out storylines, dancing around important revelations or plot points without daring to advance them. But, then, she's not the only one guilty of that charge. The book would've been about a third shorter if it hadn't spent so much time and energy setting up things that went nowhere (in this volume, at least), just being creepy and ominous for the sake of being creepy and ominous (to the point of tiresome repetition), or otherwise having people dither and waste page count by almost doing something but the deciding against it or putting it off or conveniently forgetting it. And even by the end, characters don't really learn to spit things out, and keep withholding vital information from those who most need to hear it. The plot itself, once it decides to get going (and when it decides to actually progress) is decently creepy and twisted, with ties to the occult craze and secret societies and doomsday cults built on warped belief systems, and comes to a satisfactory climax... after which the book lingers way too long on wrap-ups meant to hook me into the second volume. The titular "diviners", despite laborious introductions and dark portents of them being needed soon, don't even play into the story as much as one might expect. On the expectation that the second book, too, will burn a third or more of its page count simply setting up the volume after (or just letting plot points fizzle out), I don't expect I'll continue. Otherwise, it's not a bad story, with some interesting ideas; I just wish it had actually gone somewhere with more of them.