Hey y'all, it’s Taylor and for my posts during Pride Month I’ll be reviewing books by and about LGBTQ+ people. The books will all by YA fiction as that is what I enjoy reading, so while I know they are not everyone’s cup of tea, I hope you find my recommendations useful, or at least interesting. The reviews will go up once a week on Thursday, and feature a diverse range of characters. There will also be a special bonus non-fiction book post going up some time this month. I hope you all enjoy, have as good a pride month as you can right now and let me know some of your favourite LGBTQ+ books!
Beauty Queens by Libba Bray
Many of us were forced to read the violent Lord of the Flies book in GCSE English. Based on privileged rich white cishet boys from private school they quickly turn to violence and murder. Beauty Queens is a female parody with a diverse cast and much better character survival rate.
A plane of Miss Teen America contestants crashes on an island, all with different backstories, privileges, and reasons for competing. Consequently, the cast is highly diverse, featuring a lesbian, 2 WOC, a deaf queer girl and a trans girl. I will not spoil too much but in short, things go a lot better than in the original. And it deals with society issues, related to family bs, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and sexism.
Don’t get me wrong, I know that the Lord of the Flies had a place in calling out people with privilege for thinking themselves to be highly civilised, but stories that feature characters from other backgrounds and so have different endings only strengthens this idea that white male supremacy is toxic. The Beauty Queens book is not alone in doing this, as there was a recent news story about a real life case, involving a group of boys from Tonga, who managed to live civilised on a deserted island for around 15 months. The existence of a book telling a different yet similar story, changing the cast to be a diverse group of teenage girls, adds to this story to show how privilege corrupts. This book was a refreshing read in the middle of my GCSEs, as no longer did I just get the perspective of all humanity being awful and corrupted, based on a very small and limiting sample of people, and I hope you enjoy it to.
Trigger warnings: bigotry, mild sex scenes, mentions of death & injury
By Taylor Adams
Get a copy of Beauty Queens online from Book Depository or AbeBooks.
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