No food, no water, no signal, and no… eyeliner?!?

(first published in Manila Bulletin, Students and Campuses section)

The stage is set for the Forty-first Annual Miss Teen Dream Pageant. Fifty Teen Dreamers board the plane to Paradise Cove to film some fun-in-the-sun pieces and rehearse their performance numbers for the pageant. But the beauty queens never get to their destination, as the plane crashes, and the survivors find themselves marooned on a desert island — no food, no water, no signal, and no eyeliner.

Thus begins Scholastic Press’ Beauty Queens by NY Times bestselling author Libba Bray (A Great and Terrible Beauty, Rebel Angels, The Sweet Far Thing, and Going Bovine). Beauty Queens is a young adult novel that has the spirit of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies fused with Sandra Bullock’s Ms. Congeniality movies, or more accurately, that of the iconic 80’s Pinoy film, Temptation Island.

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