Beauty Queens

In the book Beauty Queens by Libba Bray a plane full of the 50 Teen Dream Pageant contestants crashes onto a deserted island. This book doesn't exactly have one main theme, but one of my questions was about people who influence other people. In this book other people don't influence other people, but more like expectations and dreams of other people influenced their decisions when living on the island. Each of the surviving girls find themselves while surviving this harsh island. One of the main influences is how their family or friends see them. They think that the pageant is all they think about and care about. One of the girls actually joined so they could prove that pageants aren't everything. Beauty pageants are a lot of work, and it must be tedious when you aren't the one who want's it.

These girls were influenced by the image everyone thought they were, almost like peer pressure. One of the girls, Taylor, was shaped to be her mothers spitting image, and worshipped the "queen of Beauty Queens" Ladybird Hope. Taylor actually went crazy near the end, but during her parts you could tell her life was hard growing up. Most of the parents of these contestants thought that their child would be just like them when they grew up, which is a mistake. These parents are pressuring their daughters to parade around for something they might not care about. Worse even, they might care about it because pageants are the only thing they know. My parents are very open to new ideas, so i never dealt with influencing of that sort.

Some of the girls in the Teen Dream Pageant also had personal problems. One of the girls used to be a guy in a famous boy band. Once the other girls found out they were judgmental and didn't understand. I feel like they should have had a little more sympathy for the 'girl' they had known for a while. I have definitely been misunderstood. I am misunderstood a lot everyday because of the things I say. I usually say the wrong things at random times, and I am very impulsive when I speak. If there is something I want to say, and I'm about to say it, I don't think about how it sounds before it comes out. Like one time with my friends, one of us ordered cookies. I had taken one when she wasn't looking, not knowing she go them for herself. When she tried to take it back I said abruptly "you monster!" We all had a good laugh about it, and i still got part of that cookie, but I had no idea what I was saying until it came out, and I was kind of embarrassed. Upon leaving the island, each girl left with a new prospective on their life, and what they wanted to be.