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.
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