A Plane Full of Beauty Queens Crashes on a Deserted Island. Aaaannd.....Go!: Beauty Queens by Libba Bray

What is it with me and excessively long post titles? Oh well, they're fun.

Also, I'm skipping around a little with my next couple books. I just had access to this book and I wanted to start it. Especially after I found out that David Levithan was her editor.

So, let me start off with: I really liked this book. It was fun. Every single aspect of this book was as sarcastic as possible (sometimes the sarcasm was a little too much, but usually the end result was totally worth it) and formatted in a pretty entertaining way. I listed to part of it on audiobook and found out it was read by the author who was so in tune with her characters that she knew exactly how she wanted them to sound.

The premise itself was pretty straight forward. A plane carrying 50 girls crashes on its way to have the girls film promotional stuff for the "Miss Teen Dream" Beauty Pageant. But something happens and they go down, leaving only twelve survivors. The story is basically Miss Congeniality meets Lost meets Kim Jung Il and Sara Palin.

The essential idea is that the girls are part of a scandal to take down MoMo ChaCha--a dictator--through corporate espionage by using the girls as press when "the dictator" or people that work for the Corporation (the all seeing Big Brother type business that produces all aspects of low culture including beauty products and reality TV). The Sara Palin character, LadyBird Hope, is hoping to use the takedown of MoMo (and the "tragic" death of the girls as a way of gaining power and taking the presidency. So, as you can tell, this entire book is a giant commentary (complete with footnotes) about the corruption of politics and big businesses and how all these things are in bed together. Also it's about girls screwing the patriarchy through girl power, coming into their own, and accepting one another for who they are while empowering other girls to do the same.

But I don't want to focus on the politics. Instead I want to focus on the girls.

The role call goes as such: "Of the fifty states, only twelve girl representatives were accounted for, including Miss California, Shanti Singh; Miss Michigan, Jennifer Huberman; and Miss Rhode Island, Petra West, who, ironically, was the biggest girl in the pageant at nearly six feet. Some girls argued over whether the death of Miss Massachusetts --- favored by bookies to win the whole thing --- meant that the competition would never feel entirely fair."

There's also Adina (New Jersey) who entered the competition to write about it. She calls herself the Che Guevara of Beauty Pageants. Mary Lou from Montana who's rather sweet and considers herself a wild girl if not contained (think sexually active werewolf... without all the extra hair), Sosi from Illinois, Nicole from California, and Miss Texas; Taylor. Taylor is the quintessential beauty queen character from Texas stereotype. She's into guns and very much adheres to the idea of a non-feminist doctrine and basically lives by the Miss Teen Dream manual.

I found four girls in this group the most interesting, and relevant to my studies: Sosie, Jennifer, Petra, and Taylor.

Jennifer and Sosie are pretty straight forward. Sosie is deaf and spends a lot of the book speaking loudly while Jennifer is a juvie kid who was put into this program because the Corporation thought it would be good to have a reformed bad girl. Jennifer seems to initially be the stereotypical "butch" lesbian with the fact that she's rather masculine in her actions and words and she's obsessed with comic books. She forms an attraction to Sosie immediately and they become inseparable. Their side story consists of Sosie wondering if she actually likes Jennifer or if she's just in this because she wants to be Jennifer's best friend. The inclusion of their story was very important, at least to me... even if I couldn't deal with how much the author yelled when she did Sosie's voice. The fact that Jennifer showed a very healthy mix of masculine and feminine attributes (she was the first to offer the option of 'Girl Con' to empower women in all forms of their life) and an openness in her sexuality, even when the Corporation was trying to shut her down is a strong statement that gay female characters can have good story line and remain strong in their sexuality without beating the reader over the head with it.


Petra. Dear Petra. I don't think I've ever found a character so very endearing. Petra (SPOILERS) was a boy. A boy in a Corporation boy band. She was kicked out of the band after it was discovered his inner self was more feminine than masculine. She was offered to have her transition surgery costs paid off if she joined the Miss Teen Dream Pageant, got into the top ten, and then revealed herself afterwards as a pointed message about gender and sexuality roles in these overly feminine pageants. She has the best personality of all the girls, being very down to earth and sure in her femininity and thankfully, like all the girls, she gets a happy ending. When a boat full of hot pirates (another Corporation reality show) lands on the island she immediately wins over the slightly lecherous captain and is surprised when he's incredibly accepting of her gender. The entire reason Petra was created was to lend a voice to trans* people in literature. Usually trans* characters face massive amounts of opposition in literature so the presence of Petra was to show a very strong trans* character in a position where she was able to find love in another person who saw and accepted her as she was. Her story was wonderful and I appreciated the fact that Libba Bray created her and made her very real.

Finally I want to discuss Taylor. Out of all the characters she had the biggest change, being the fact that when they arrived on the island she insisted they keep up their show regiment because they had an obligation as women to give a great show. She honestly seems like a feminist's nightmare, but when Petra's true self is reveled her response is to quote the Miss Teen Dream handbook and state that it doesn't have a clear "no" about trans* people so Petra could stay because she obviously wants to be a girl and she should be allowed that right, since be a woman is awesome. She doesn't seem to take offense at Petra's gender or even Jennifer and Sosie's relationship and instead shows that even the most overly fanatical people can be accepting--even though Taylor's reasons were a little over the top. But I still loved her. Especially after she went insane and took to living in the woods and killing Corporation workers to protect the girls and the integrity of the Miss Teen Dream name while taking their weapons and hiding them under her mud and stick statue called Miss Miss.

Tl;dr: the end idea is that each female character represented a stereotype of women in media and how they're treated. Putting them on an island created a more female power situation rather than a Lord of the Flies situation. Though a lot of stuff is shoved into this book, the real story in this book is the story each girl carries with her and what she stands for. I gave this book a 4.5 out of 5 basically because sometimes the sarcasm got to be a bit much and I couldn't stand the MoMo ChaCha and LadyBird storyline... though it was worth it to listen to her voice read in the best Sara Palin accent... next to Tina Fay's.

Premises, Premises: Boy Meets Boy, by David Levithan.

I'm going to preface this post with a small note about how desperately I wanted to like this book. I love David Levithan ever since I read Everyday. I thought, sweet! Boy Meets Boy. It feels like a cute Valentines Day book and knowing Levithan's style of writing it won't be heavy handed or anything like that. And it really wasn't, but then again, it kinda was with how overly utopiotic it felt.

So, thinking of it that way, Boy Meets Boy was a bit of a let down.

Putting aside my love for David Levithan... it was still a little bit of a let down.

I've noticed that Levithan is a fan of premises. Most can be summed up in a sentence or two. Everyday: 'A' wakes up every morning in the body of a different person until 'A' falls in love with the Manic Pixie Dream girl trope. Will Grayson, Will Grayson: Two boys with the same name meet and it all leads to the world's most amazing musical. He's a friend of Libba Bray and was the inspiration for her story "Beauty Queens" which I'll cover later on in my readings. But in an interview she said one day he turned to her and said, "A plane full of beauty queens crashes on an island. Aaand.... go."

Boy Meets Boy is definitely one of his pet premise stories set up as a love story that takes place in a utopian society where almost everyone is accepted for who they are. Everything in this book is basically a unicorn tail. All rainbows and sparkles. The quarterback is a drag queen named Infinite Darlene and she's also homecoming queen. Vegetarians overtook the McDonalds and turned it into a Veggie D's. Homosexuality is almost completely accepted by the entire population (by everyone except the religious nuts). The list goes on.

Paul is the narrator of the story who is openly out (ever since his second grade teacher made the note that he was 'DEFINITELY GAY. and had a 'WONDERFUL SENSE OF SELF'). He meets Noah in a quirky way and they immediately fall into infatuation before Paul's ex-bf Kyle shows up and tries to win him back. It's basically a rom com.

It took me forever to figure out what was wrong with it, and then it finally hit me: It's a fan fiction.

Boy Meets Boy is basically David Levithan's version of fan fiction. It has a quick romantic build up between the two main characters, a wrench in the form of another boy, quirky outside characters that don't seem to completely fit, and a random song that filled up a few pages. So, in the end it's either a fan fiction or it's a John Hughes film. I honestly can't decide.

It's interesting to actually study this book though. In my pop culture class we've been discussing the four romantic comedy sub-plots and honestly this showed all the ear marks of a redemption and a pursuit plot. Which is interesting because that would mean that Noah is the one being pursued while Paul is the one who needs to be redeemed, turning this into a hetero-normative romcom played out as an LGBT love story. Which, if you think about it is kind of smart on Levithan's part, since he always hides a message about equality and love in his books.

In the end I really don't know how I feel about it. I can tell that Levithan was trying to create a book for gay readers that would be just like any other "straight book" but something about it felt off. Like he was trying too hard to create some form of utopia for his readers that felt a little too forced. I did like Paul and his love with Noah was cute and everything about the entire book was cute. Everyone was happy and cute. Overall I'm going to give this a 3.5 for a rating just because it felt weirdly forced and not quite... right. It's hard to explain what I'm not satisfied with it other than it just wasn't... enough...

Catcher in the Rye.

So evidently, I am a blog slacker, but I promise I have been doing some major reading. In fact, I found this fabulous book at the library which analyzes the adolescent woman in literature. It is so helpful for my thesis/idea for this class. It's got a fair amount of psychoanalysis in it, and basically I am in love with it.

I am not however, in love with The Catcher in the Rye. I know it's a classic read for high school kids, but I just can't like it. The only thing I did enjoy was Holden's sarcasm. It felt like a rip off of Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise. Also, it was not particularly helpful in discovering how adolescent women view their bodies. It was helpful in how men view them, as sexual objects, which we already knew. Nonetheless, I wanted to see how Jane felt about her body and how she dealt with her sexuality and body image. She attempts to tap into her sexuality with Holden, such as when she puts her hand on the back of his neck, but she is almost completely closed off when it comes to their relationship, which probably stems from the implied sexual abuse at the hands of her booze headed step father.
The way Phoebe travels back and forth between acting like a little kid and grown-up is remiscent of Holden himself. It's almost as though Phoebe's a younger version of himself; no wonder he wants to protect her so badly.
What is up with the butt-pinching? When Holden sneaks into Phoebe's room, he reaches out and gives her a "pinch on the behind. It was sticking way out in the breeze … She has hardly any behind" When he talks about other women's behinds he always calls them "butts" or "asses." And he spends a lot of time admiring Sally Hayes's cute little ass even if he thinks she's phony for twitching it around in front of him. So, when he pinches Phoebe's behind, is it sexual? Or is he just reassuring himself that she is still innocent?

So basically, book that are written with a male protagonist, are seemingly going to have a male POV towards women, and I'm not going to learn much about how they feel about themselves, because I am learning how the male characters view them. Which, now that I think about it, makes sense, but it's a tiny bit irritating. Added to the fact this book and I are not going to be headed to bed together any time soon.

The YA Genre: Themes and Tropes

It's been fun reading your posts about all the books you are reading. It seems like love--or at least the promise of love--is paramount to everything all three of you have read. It makes sense since love and relationships are central preoccupations for most teen readers.

Beyond love, though, what themes and tropes are common throughout these books? I've been immersed in my own reading (recall that my focus is on popular YA published since 2005). Here are the commonalities I've discovered so far:

- First-person narrators--A first-person narrator does personalize a story; however, it also limits the viewpoint so much. I suppose the narrator's myopic view of the world nicely replicates how readers feel. We're all narrating our own stories, obsessing about the details, and limited to the information we have in front of us.

- Love triangles--Oh, lord, the love triangles! It's hard to feel sorry for main characters who have to choose between two equally perfect males.

- Good girls and bad girls--The delineation is uncomfortably clear. It's that age-old stereotype: Good girls are worthy protagonists; bad girls have oral sex.

- Girls who are seemingly ordinary but are actually very special--I think that's a common fantasy for teen readers--that no one as yet recognized just how special they are. Fear of being average or ordinary is a huge trope that runs throughout many of these books.

- Parents who are clueless or neglectful--Getting rid of the parents (either by physically removing them or by making them too stupid  or preoccupied to be good parents) allows teen characters to find their own way, just as readers are metaphorically separating themselves from their own parents.

YA definitely has a limited formula, but there's not much that separates it from adult fiction. What is it that makes a YA book YA? One obvious answer is where it's shelved in the library or bookstore. But if someone mysteriously unshelved all the YA and removed the labels, would we still be able to identify it? What would be our clues? Do we need the larger genre to understand the work these narratives are doing?

Ari, You're Fighting This War in the Worst Possible Way: Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alre Saenz

"The problem with my life was that it was someone else’s idea."

Imagine a book with no clear plot. Imagine a book with little to no exposition. Imagine a book where the story wasn't about politics or sexual revolutions. Imagine a book about two boys raised in El Paso in the late 80's where they spend their summers saving birds, and each other. 

I absolutely loved 'Aristotle and Dante...". The story is told from the point of Aristotle, or Ari, for short. Ari has a very straight forward point of view. He doesn't waste words on long explanations or descriptions of things. I think the majority of Ari's description goes into the description of his old Cherry Red Ford truck with Chrome. Anyway, Dante is described as a "lighter skinned Mexican" than Ari who considers himself a "Mexican", meaning that he's far more part of the culture than Dante, whose parent are a therapist and English professor. Dante even confesses to Ari that he doesn't like the fact that he's Mexican and seems to want to keep himself as far as he can from his culture.

A lot of issues are squeezed into 'Aristotle and Dante...' such as accepting race, social barriers, sexuality, gender, politics but for the most part they're not as big as they would seem. This story is told like a free form poem, but in verse. There's no major plot other than Aristotle just trying to get through the summer unscathed, which really doesn't happen. He meets Dante, who teaches him how to swim and over the course of the summer becomes his best friend, which is something neither kid has ever had.

I loved the way 'Aristotle and Dante...' treated sexuality and love. Nothing ever seemed to be forced. For the most part Ari was a angry kid with an older brother in prison, with no real understanding as to why he was there, fighting with the fact that he didn't know what to do with his life and living in self-doubt. He kept his emotions locked away which made him a stark comparison to Dante who was passionate about almost everything. He cried and read and drew and ran after kids who shot birds with BB guns. Through their many oppositions they peel away at one another's emotional layers until both are bare and exposed to the elements.

Ari's love story with Dante is a very powerful one driven by friendship and the love of their parents. Both Dante and Ari are blessed by devoted parents, though both sets are just as different as the boys. Dante's parents are loving and expressive, taking Ari under their wings immediately. Ari's parents are a little less 'together' in the sense that Ari's father is a returned Vietnam Vet, emotionally scarred and quiet, and his mother is sincere and insanely loyal to her husband and son. But they represent the deep bond that parents can share with their children and how far love can go.

For the most part a major theme in this book is that of loyalty. Loyalty in love and friendship and how far love and loyalty can go. Ari feels a deep sense of loyalty to Dante and, though he has trouble expressing it verbally, he expressed it with how far he goes to take care of and protect Dante from kids that hurt birds, careening cars, and homophobic boys.

Overall, I loved this book. The prose is beautiful, the characters complex, and the message meaningful. To me it was more about accepting love than accepting sexuality. To Dante it didn't seem strange at all for him to love a boy, to want to kiss a boy, and while it took Ari a while to get there (along with some prodding from his awesome parents) he figured out how much he loved Dante. Because, after all how could Ari be ashamed of loving Dante Quintana?

I wish there was a way to really fully express my love for this book. I feel that this is a perfect love story and a great step for writers of LGBT YA literature, because it shows a love story. It's not a political statement or a carrier of a heavy handed message. Instead it just tells a story about two stupid boys trying to figure out what the hell they're doing. My rating? 5 out of 5. I'd give it a 6, but that feels a little like overkill.

Revised or Modern Fairy-Tale?: Scarlet in the Snow by Sophie Masson

     Sorry this has taken a little longer. I've been so focused on narrowing my study, I forget to tell you all about the wonderful findings I've gained from my reading.

     As I've been narrowing my field of study, what seems to be a strong aspect of YA "fantasy" is this flexibility and multi-dimensionality of characters, settings, and the immense power that gives the reader. You find yourself disappearing into the story rather than the story making an impact on you. That may seem like a bad thing, but it allows the reader to unconsciously make connections to the story, rather than consciously focusing on the themes that relate to them. It's a strange kind of freedom, that lets you escape into the novel--which is the one of the large draws of most leisure reading--but allows the reader to maintain a working relation to the lessons and/or commentaries being presented under the guise of entertainment. Sophie Masson's Scarlet in the Snow definitely falls into this category, almost forcing you to stop thinking so hard.

     All right, I'll admit: this is one of my favorite fairy tales and as such I'm biased to like it. But "Beauty and the Beast" has been revisited so many times in a variety of different ways over the years, one more shouldn't make much of an impact. But in Scarlet in the Snow, everything you may have thought about the tale before is blown into oblivion. Okay, that may be exaggerating a bit, but you can't read it and expect the traditional storyline, because there really isn't one. Sure, you have traditional elements that distinguish it as a B&TB story: a curse, the magical castle, a disturbingly intelligent man-beast, and the plucky beauty determined to break the spell. And the rose. Always the rose. However, in the entire 318 pages of the novel, the traditional story begins and ends within the first quarter of the book, leaving the rest to completely turn the story inside out. Just because the spell has been broken doesn't necessarily mean the beast has been saved/redeemed/etc. In fact, THAT moment is when the story really turns into a quest for truth, redemption, and love.

     A brief summary--as I don't wish to give anything good away-- is needed since this is not traditional for a revised fairy tale. Natasha, the youngest of three daughters, lives with her painter mother in Ruvenya, a somewhat Russian feeling country. One night, after delivering a requisitioned painting, she is caught in a terrible blizzard, where wolves chase her to the gates of a grand mansion where the blizzard ends within the grounds. Wandering through the empty halls, she finally comes upon a garden, where she sees a single miraculous red rose blooming. When she reaches out to touch it, it withers and dies, summoning a very angry beast to punish her. Instead of her death, however, she is to repay her debt by replacing "a joy for a joy" and remaining at the mansion until her debt is repaid. Clever as she is, Natasha quickly figures out that the beast is under a dangerous and powerful spell. She determines to break it and help him in whatever way she can...until she is told marriage is the key. After about three days, the Beast, who she has decided to name Ivan, refuses to keep her there against her will and sends her home, giving her a parting gift: a petal from the rose, which will connect them should she ever wish to return. While researching the Beast's past, she is confronted by a pawn of the sorceror responsible for the curse. To save her, Ivan appears and consents to give himself up to the madman. As he does so, the spell is broken and both men disappear. Natasha, who has fallen in love with Ivan, makes it her mission to track him down and save him from the evil plots of the sorceror. She travels through many different countries, meeting many strange allies along the way, and eventually discovers her beast. But saving him will be the hardest part of the journey, requiring her to face magic so evil and powerful that it is banned by humans and fae alike.

     One of the things that I found most interesting about this novel was the nebulous setting of the events. In later English studies, we learn that there is a lot of symbolism associated with the city and the country as general settings, and this story is no exception. While Natasha, our beauty, is primarily with her family on a modest estate in rural Ruvenya, the tone of the story mirrors that of most fairy-tales, meaning you think older eras (maybe 14th or 15th-century) with dark forests, witches/demons, sleighs and horse drawn carriages, and where nightfall never bodes well for those caught outside. And for the most part, that feeling is upheld by the actions and people who live there. But there are details that belie that assumption: an alarm clock Natasha turns off, electricity, an "underground train" I assume to be a subway system, and a highly advanced fingerprint scanner used as a lock. While the alarm clock and electricity are present in Natasha's home life, the city tends to encompass everything else modern, which also makes sense. But the way that the author incorporates these two highly different eras is either very sloppy or ingenious. I'm never entirely sure. When in the country, as a reader, I find myself drifting into the mystical mindset of olden days but then, just as suddenly, can come face to face with a reminder that this is at the very least a fairly modern setting. In the sense of this belonging to a fantasy genre, it  has more than enough to recommend it, magic and fantastical creatures specifically. But to also mix modernity with the supernatural makes it difficult to discern what the rules are for this world. We aren't allowed to wipe the slate clean as with most fantasy worlds, knowing there's an entirely different set of rules and limitations than the real world, but real world structures and boundaries exist simultaneously. This novel also places a huge emphasis on the arts, literally and figuratively. The story revolves around paintings and artists, but also shows the importance of the humanities in society through the characters and their situations.

     All in all, besides making my new favorite book list, I would give this story a 4.5 stars, based on the imaginative and engaging plot, ingenious(or crazy) use of setting, and for generally refreshing the reader used to the same old story.