Beauty Queens by Libba Bray YP FIC BRAY

A plane full of beauty queens crash lands on a desert island, but this isn’t the start of a cheesy joke!  They must band together to survive the elements and a dangerous cabal of drug dealers using the island for less than noble purposes.  More importantly they must struggle to find their inner beauty and common strength or be trampled by the misogynistic hegemony of the patriarchy!  Also, they need to get their dance routines down in case they are rescued.

Libba Bray has hit it out of the park.  Her last book, the hallucinatory bizarre epic Going Bovine won raves and adulation and acclaim and other good things.  Beauty Queens has all the wit and daring of Bovine but with a more straight forward (and to me more enjoyable) narrative.  The James Bondesque adventure plot actually is thrilling and action packed, it’s just also filled with hilarious social satire and genuine emotion.  The genuine emotion and satire can come from the same characters because Bray makes what seem like stereotypes at first (like Miss Texas the brash go-getter with big hair and big dreams) evolve into real young women.  A good deal of humor and satire comes from footnotes added by the corporate sponsors of the pageant. This isn’t JUST a super funny and exciting book. The problems it tackles of how companies sell young women horrible ideas of beauty and how that affects female identity are really intelligently and bravely addressed. A great read for anyone looking for a lighthearted dark comedy with adventure and Big Ideas!

The Unidentified by Rae Mariz YP FIC MARIZ

In the not too very distant future Katey AKA Kid goes to school in the Game, a mall turned into a school by corporate sponsors. Basically a real world Facebook, kids are used to create and test new products and everyone is connected, networked, and watched 24/7, but don’t worry as Kid says herself, “We like the attention.” But when a corporate sponsor ‘brands’ Kid and she meets a group of social outcasts called the Unidentified, she starts to question if her identity is for sale. When she starts to get more involved with the Unidentified and their mysterious leader she puts herself in the middle of a conflict larger than she ever dreamed.

This is a SPOT ON look at the obsession with virtual connectedness, the obsession with fitting in, and consumer culture. Anyone that has spent hours at a time on Facebook or MySpace while texting friends at the same time should be truly freaked by this book. The plot has plenty of twists and suspense, but the real draw is the bizarre world of the Game and the ways it resembles our current tech and brand obsession, but this book isn’t technology phobic. Kid and her friends use technology themselves to express themselves and find ways to get back at the Game. this is Mariz’s first book for teens, but hopefully we’ll see many more. The Unidentified is a rare book that can look at problems with society AND have realistic human characters that the reader cares about. Check it out, then ‘Like’ it on Facebook, tweet about it, and text all your friends about how cool it is!