Beauty Queens / Libba Bray / 396p

  So, at first, I hated it.  Granted, it was an audio book which I tend to more easily dislike, but still (Libba Bray read it and usually authors ruin books when they read them themselves, but she did a great job).  I found the satire to be just too thick and almost offensive in its obviousness.  Like, seriously, I was offended for teenagers.  Also, almost all of the characters seemed to be over-simplified caricatures of themselves.  Ugh.

But then, it got a little better.  Then a little better.  It soon became a full out party of themes that I love - feminism, the evils of corporate greed, the falsity of reality tv.  So fine, it grew on me.  I think that, probably, if I read it instead of listening to it, some of the things that annoyed me wouldn't have made me as crazy (the footnotes, the "commercial breaks," the whiny voices of some of the characters, the thinly veiled Sarah Palin impression, etc.) and maybe I would have liked it more from the start.  But, in the end, I enjoyed the story and the message.

A good book to offer politically and socially conscious older teens.