This week, I will be reviewing the novel, Beauty Queens by Libba Bray. On the surface this book might seem like just another young adult fiction story, but its message is so much more impactful than most other books I’ve read from this genre. It confronts the truth behind our daily lives by dealing with race, sexism, and stereotypes, while managing to keep a light, sarcastic tone. This is especially important when dealing with these serious issues because this book is targeted primarily to teenage girls. It makes the important message accessible and appealing to them.

Libba Bray was born on March 11, 1964 and grew up in Denton, Texas. Her mother was a high school English teacher and her dad was a Presbyterian minister. Three weeks after her high school graduation, she was involved in a car accident that caused her to undergo thirteen surgeries over the span of six years to reconstruct her face. She has an artificial left eye because of the accident. She graduated from University of Texas, Austin in 1988 with a degree in Theater. Bray moved to New York City and worked for a publishing agency. There, she met her husband, who encouraged her to write a young adult novel. Bray published her first novel, A Great and Terrible Beauty in 2006, which became a New York Times bestseller. She wrote two more novels to complete the trilogy. Beauty Queens was published in 2011. She currently lives in New York with her husband and teenage son.

Fifty contestants in the Miss Teen Dream Pageant become stranded on a deserted island after their plane crashes with little food and water. This initially appears to set up a female version of Lord of the Flies. Considering the premise, a plane full of pageant contestants crash on a small tropical island, it seems like another excuse to pit girls against one another with teenage beauty queens tearing apart competition to fend for themselves while awaiting rescue. But Bray subverts that paradigm of girl-on-girl psychological fighting as a spectator sport, where the girls come together in time of crisis. She focuses on the way girls are portrayed by the media, jealous, competitive, and vindictive and turns that on its head. That’s how some of the girls start out because of the internalized misogyny and male gaze of the media. But while they may argue and bicker endlessly in the beginning, the girls discover more than competition in themselves and that’s when their friendships truly begin. The island serves as a place where the girls can get away from the society that pressures them into hurting themselves and each other. It’s a place where they realize that under the methodically constructed beauty pageant personas, they’re all just girls trying to grow up in a world that always wants them to be someone else.

The novel is told from multiple first person views, rotating between the beauty contestants. Here, John Oliver discusses the pressure and high expectations for beauty queens. Initially, every girl comes across as a caricature of the smiling picture of a beauty queen, each representing a certain stereotype. There’s the girl, who eats, lives and breathes pageants. There’s the lesbian. There’s the beautiful but painfully stupid girl, who panics when faced with something that hasn’t been practiced and memorized for interviews or pageants. There’s the black girl. There’s the sweetheart. There’s the disabled deaf girl. There’s the anti-pageant feminist who’s out to destroy the system that exploits women.

But slowly, the girls start to surprise us by diverting from their stereotypes as secrets emerge and realizations are made. As the story continues we realize that some of these girls don’t even know who they are behind their perfect pageant personalities. They’ve been doing this so long and feel so desperately the need to win, that they’ve become the images they think people want to see. When they become stuck on an island with the need to survive and with no one to watch or judge them, they have a terrifying world spread out before them. For the first time they get to decide who they are and who they want to be. The good girl learns it’s okay to be a little wild. The anti-pageant girl learns that wanting to be pretty isn’t a sign of weakness or shallowness. They learn about themselves as individuals. They learn how to be comfortable, with who they are. They learn what they really want out of life.

Even though these girls are girly-girls who care a great deal about their physical appearance, they are able to survive not despite their femininity but because of it. They turn their heels and bras into weapons. They show that femininity can be powerful.

It’s satirical with some crazy lines and ridiculous situations, but it’s only to highlight the media and society’s skewed expectations of young women. It has a surrealist quality to it that further emphasizes the ridiculous expectations placed on girls. It’s tongue-in-cheek funny with a touching tale of friendship, an empowering self-discovery story that turns stereotypes on their heads. I recommend this book to everyone.

This week I will be reviewing The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker.

Out of all the books I’ve read in my life, this one has impacted me the most and definitely changed the way I travel through the world. I read it for the first time about a year ago during my senior year of high school and I re-read it over this past winter break.

Gavin de Becker is an expert on the prediction and management of violence. He designed the mosaic threat assessment systems used to screen threats to Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was appointed twice to the President’s Advisory Board at the United States Department of Justice. He also served two terms on the Governor’s Advisory Board at the California Department of Mental Health. He currently runs a personal security firm with a wide array of clients from battered women’s shelters to celebrities. His long list of impressive accomplishments makes him the perfect person to discuss the important issue of safety and prevention of violence.

“He had probably been watching her for a while.”

From the very first line, de Becker grabs your attention and holds onto it. Full of facts, case histories, statistics, and advice, it still reads like a thrilling novel. The Gift of fear breaks down violent situations into a step-by-step guide from, both an outside, expert perspective, and the surviving victims perspective. Each hour seventy-five women are raped in the United States, every few seconds a woman is beaten, and each day four hundred Americans suffer shooting injuries. Often times attackers, stalkers, and physical violence is framed as unpredictable. De Becker challenges the myth that most violent acts are random and shows that they usually have discernible motives and are preceded by clear warning signs. Underlying all of the stories, statistics, and expertise is the notion that humans have a more sophisticated violence detection system that most people realize. He attempts to bring awareness to this intuition, so that more people listen to it.

De Becker notes that victims of violence usually feel a sense of fear before any threat or violence takes place. They may distrust or ignore the fear, or they might take action to save themselves from harm. It’s that feeling that something just isn’t quite right for no consciously apparent reason. These survival signals are often ignored. This book is about the prediction of violence-the things mostly women can do to avoid being the victims of assaults and rapes and beatings. But not in an offensive way telling women how to dress, but how women can be smarter about what they notice and how to react to them. In a similar manner, Louis CK satirically notes the danger women face in daily life. The book teaches how to identify the warning signals of a potential attacker and recommends strategies for dealing with the problem before it becomes life threatening. The case studies are gripping and suspenseful, and include tactics for dealing with similar situations. Each chapter involves different situations, stranger violence, domestic violence, stalking, workplace violence, and school violence. This information is of vital importance because it could save lives.

His first example tells the story of Kelly, who was brutally assaulted and raped and whose intuition saved her life. Kelly recounts to de Becker how a charismatic man charmed his way into her apartment under the pretense of helping her with her groceries. From the moment she heard his voice, she knew something sounded wrong, but she pushed away her fears and even, “felt guilty about her suspicion.” Each time she said ‘no, she didn’t need help,’ he pushed until she said yes each time. Eventually they entered her apartment and he had all the power. After the rape, he left the room saying, “I promise I’m not going to hurt you.” While he was in the kitchen, she snuck out of her room and across the hall to her neighbor’s. While discussing her ordeal with de Becker she mentions, “I knew that if I stayed in my room, he was going to come back from the kitchen and kill me, but I don’t know how I was so certain.” Going back in her memory through the event she pinpoints each exact moment that caused her to flee her apartment at that moment. She listened to her gut and it saved her life. De Becker further explains this specific example on Oprah.

De Becker gives real examples of the patterns in action, thought, and belief of criminals and he explains why they are successful.

He outlines several pre-incident indicators that when properly identified, can help avoid violence.

Forced teaming. When a person implies that he has something in common with the victim when it isn’t really true. This occurs when he speaks in “we” terms to force a false sense of trust.

Too many details. A lie usually includes an excessive amount of details to make themselves sound more credible to the victim.

Loan sharking. Unsolicited help to the victim so that they feel obliged to reciprocate a gesture.

Unsolicited promise. A promise to do or not do something when no promise has been asked for. This most likely means that the promise will be broken.

Discounting the word no. Refusing to accept rejection even for the tiniest reason.

Charm and niceness. De Becker says it best himself.

“We must learn and then teach our children that niceness does not equal goodness. Niceness is a decision, a strategy of social interaction; it is not a character trait. People seeking to control others almost always present the image of a nice person in the beginning. Niceness often always has a discoverable motive.” Niceness is a form of manipulation.

De Becker highlights these pre-incident indicators to recognize them when they happen in your own life.

“Trust that what causes alarm probably should, because when it comes to danger, intuition is always right in at least two important ways. 1. It is always in response to something. 2. It always has your best interest at heart.”

Learning to predict and recognize violence is the best step in preventing it. This book could save your life.

For my passion blog for the spring semester I will be reviewing and analyzing a new book each week. Some I read over the summer, some I read over break, and some I will read during the duration of this semester.

The first book I will be discussing is one of my all time favorites, Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. If you’ve read my blog from the fall, you know I’ve brought her name up several times either from her presence in Beyonce’s Flawless or from my favorite TED talk, which you should seriously watch.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is an African writer born in Nigeria on September 15, 1977. She was the fifth out of six children to Igbo parents, Grace Ifeoma, and James Nwoye Adichie. Adichie grew up in Nsukka. Her father worked at the University of Nigeria as the first professor of statistics, who later became Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University. Her mother was the first woman registrar at the University of Nigeria. She completed her secondary education at the school attached to the University. She studied medicine and pharmacy at the University of Nigeria. At nineteen, she left to study in the United States. She studied communication at Drexel University for two years, then studied communication and political science at Eastern Connecticut State University. She completed a master’s degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins. During her time at Eastern Connecticut State University she wrote her first novel Purple Hibiscus, which won much critical acclaim. She now divides her time between Nigeria and the United States.

Americanah tells the story of a strong-willed Nigerian woman Ifemelu, who leaves her home in Nigeria for American to pursue her studies. She endures years of near poverty before graduating from college, starting a blog, and winning a fellowship at Princeton, before coming full circle and returning to Nigeria. Americanah is about being black in the 21^st century. It’s about first love. It’s about growing up. It’s about returning home. Adichie examines how blackness functions in America, Nigeria, and Britain, but Americanah is not only a novel about race, it also attempts to understand universal human experience.

Ifemelu and Obinze meet and fall in love in Nigeria, while in high school, stay together through university until striking in Nigeria cause them to pursue education elsewhere. These characters are not those of stereotypical African poverty. They do not flee war or starvation. They leave for choice and opportunity. Obinze heads to Britain, while Ifemelu travels to America. When they do reunite many years later back in Nigeria nothing is like they remember. It’s about the universal experience of leaving home and creating home in your mind. But home is constantly changing and you are constantly changing when you leave home. Soon enough you are different and home is different so its not home anymore.

The story is told in flashbacks through both Obinze’s and Ifemelu’s point of view from their school days growing up to modern day until they eventually meet again in Nigeria. When we first meet Ifemelu, she’s having her hair braided at an African salon in Trenton, NJ. She has to travel a great distance just to find a hair salon that get work with her hair. Right away hair serves as a greater metaphor about black experience in America. Ifemelu does not chemically treat her hair to match the white standard of beauty in America. This is especially relevant because until recently, the U.S. military did not recognize natural black hair as acceptable. But at this point, she is a successful writer, but she has to travel to a poor predominately black neighborhood. But this wasn’t always the case. Ifemelu chemically treats her hair until her scalp burns. Eventual she comes to the revelation and embraces her natural hair Ifemelu reclaims her own African identity.

Ifemelu’s journey in America is directed by experiences of race that wouldn’t seem new to black Americans, but they’re new to her. Ifemelu’s experiences eventually manifest into a blog entitled, “Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black.” She makes astute revelations about the way race unconsciously seems into our daily existence. Her observations are particularly sharp because as she notes, “I don’t think of myself as black and I only became black when I came to this country.” Race confuses her because it is an imaginary construct with actual consequences. Race dictates and drives her life in America, but Ifemelu notices that white Americans are scared about talking about race and often claim that it doesn’t exist.

“In America, racism exists but racists are all gone. Racists belong to the past. Racists are the thin-lipped mean white people in the movies about the civil rights era. Here’s the thing: the manifestation of racism has changed but the language has not. So if you haven’t lynched somebody then you can’t be called a racist. If you’re not a bloodsucking monster, then you can’t be called a racist. Somebody has to be able to say that racists are not monsters.”

Ifemelu unapologetically describes the more nuanced racism she experiences that one wouldn’t understand unless you experienced it. Here are some more articles that further explain this notion. Adichie presents the uncomfortable realities of our life right in front of our face. It is always genuine. She doesn’t try to sugar coat it because the life of a black person in America is not sugar coated.

It is even in the process of becoming a movie staring Lupita Nyong’o. This novel describes the human experience of growing up and leaving home and finding love and yourself. It also describes race how it functions in the U.S. because as black people living in America, race centrally dictates their life.