The Miss Teen Dream pageant, sponsored by The Corporation, embraces the young women of America as the bright and shining
lights of the future... to sell innumerable beauty products, pitch TV shows, and monetize invented insecurities while raising
the bar of the feminine ideal to ever-more-unattainable heights and placing more and more barriers to their success. This
year's fifty contestants are on their way to Hawaii for the big show when their plane goes down, killing the flight crew,
several passengers, and the camera crew. The shellshocked survivors face numerous challenges on the strange tropical island
where they find themselves: thirst, starvation, tidal waves, giant snakes, hallucinogenic berries, quicksand, and the loss of
most of their pageant gowns and accessories... not to mention a top-secret Corporation base under the obligatory volcano, key
to a secret plot by Corporation boardmember (and the most famous former Miss Teen Dream in the world) Ladybird Hope for
national and world domination via an insane dictator and weaponized beauty products.
Review
This audiobook, narrated by the author, was one of the funniest, sharpest, most unpredictable surprises I've experienced in
some time. From the very start, it turns its scathing satiric eye on predatory capitalism, society's impossible expectations
for girls, politics, television and reality TV, pop culture, racism and stereotypes, and more in a story that is both an homage
to and razor-sharp subversion of numerous tropes and cliches. It's set in a world that's both a funhouse mirror version of our
own and eerily, depressingly, and even presciently familiar, especially when reality TV tactics really have been used to co-opt
the highest offices in the land by the time I read (or listened, rather); the book was originally published in 2011.
The story kicks off quickly, opening with characters who initially (and deliberately) seem to come straight from the stock bin,
but even from the start there are little twists and digs; as bold and brassy hyper-competitor Miss Texas is leading the
survivors in a prayer thanking Jesus for saving all of them, the sudden death of Miss Delaware causes her to revise her prayer
to saving "some" of them without missing a beat, before insisting that their priority is not to find shelter or food or even
devising a way to signal for help, but to keep practicing their pageant routines. As alliances and rivalries form and break,
the girls come into their own, all of them suffering under the burdens piled upon them by family, society, and the advertising
agencies embodied in the ubiquitous Corporation. Their time on the island is as liberating as it is harrowing, showing them all
what they're capable of when they're not under the pageant microscope and turned against each other. When the greater threat
becomes apparent, nobody expects them to be able to rise to the challenge... nobody but the girls themselves, who are not who
they were before the crash. (Or, rather, they're who they should always have been, but for a world intent on grinding them down
to dust.) Periodic footnotes elaborate on celebrities, reality TV shows, products, music, and more, while commercial breaks
hilariously skewer ads targeting women and girls with everything from gummy antidepressants for children to animal-shaped maxi
pads to keep girls from being cranky during their menstrual cycle and inane movies highlighting ridiculous romantic expectations
that undercut women at every turn. I snickered innumerable times while listening even as the action and stakes kept ratcheting up
to an explosive finale. The audiobook ended with an interesting (and amusing) author interview.
For getting me to crack a smile more than once at my mind-numbing job (probably to the confusion of co-workers) and for exceeding
any expectations I had going in, I'm giving this one top marks... and if you can listen to the audiobook version, I can highly
recommend it. Bray's delivery just is the cherry on top of the tale.
Evangeline "Evie" O'Neill never means to cause trouble... well, not bad trouble. But this time, she's gotten herself in a real
pickle: not only did she get herself drunk (illegal, what with Prohibition on), but she let slip a shameful secret about a popular
boy in town. She should've known better than to show off her little gift - her ability to glean secrets and memories from objects
- but, well, it was a party, and there was alcohol, and it got her the attention she craved. In their small Ohio town, it's a
scandal for the ages, and the only way her parents see out of the mess is to ship their wayward teenage daughter off to a bachelor
uncle in New York City. This, for Evie, sounds like a dream come true. 1920's New York City is where it's all happening, a city of
glitz and glamor, where anybody can become anything. Sure, Uncle Will's a stodgy old stick in the mud, running a dud of a museum
dedicated to supernatural curiosities, but Evie's determined to make this city her own, joining in the flapper scene and sneaking
out to speakeasies and living life to the fullest. If only she could shake the nightmares about her dead brother... Then the
killings start, murders with occult overtones. When Uncle Will is called in as a professional consultant, Evie is plunged into the
dark and dangerous side of the city, and a mad cult's prophecy about the end of the world that may be on the verge of coming
true.
Review
I had a very mixed reaction to this one. On the plus side, Bray establishes a strong sense of the times and the place, evoking
the energy and the slang, as well as the dark undercurrents that resonate to this day (particularly the mutually incompatible ideas
of what America is supposed to be, the irrationality of extremism, and the notion of eugenics and other means to "purify" the
nation and eliminate "undesirable" or "weak" or "corrupting" elements of society). Evie's a girl of her time and in her moment,
embracing the seemingly limitless possibilities of the city that never sleeps in the heyday of the 1920's. She's also rather
selfish and somewhat dense and prone to simply not saying important things to draw out storylines, dancing around important
revelations or plot points without daring to advance them. But, then, she's not the only one guilty of that charge. The book
would've been about a third shorter if it hadn't spent so much time and energy setting up things that went nowhere (in this volume,
at least), just being creepy and ominous for the sake of being creepy and ominous (to the point of tiresome repetition), or
otherwise having people dither and waste page count by almost doing something but the deciding against it or putting it off or
conveniently forgetting it. And even by the end, characters don't really learn to spit things out, and keep withholding vital
information from those who most need to hear it. The plot itself, once it decides to get going (and when it decides to actually
progress) is decently creepy and twisted, with ties to the occult craze and secret societies and doomsday cults built on warped
belief systems, and comes to a satisfactory climax... after which the book lingers way too long on wrap-ups meant to hook me into
the second volume. The titular "diviners", despite laborious introductions and dark portents of them being needed soon, don't
even play into the story as much as one might expect. On the expectation that the second book, too, will burn a third or more of
its page count simply setting up the volume after (or just letting plot points fizzle out), I don't expect I'll continue. Otherwise,
it's not a bad story, with some interesting ideas; I just wish it had actually gone somewhere with more of them.
Like many teen boys, 16-year-old Cameron Smith just can't seem to figure himself out, let alone his future. Nothing ever seems
to matter, like he's a spectator in his own existence. He can't be bothered to engage with his peers, save a small group of
potheads who gather in the high school bathroom, and it's been years since he was close to his popular sister, his professor
father, or one-time literary scholar mother. But he's just a high school junior; surely he has plenty of time to pull himself
together.
Then he sees the strange storm and the fire giants and the crazy-talking punk angel in the torn fishnet stockings, and suffers
the first of many seizures, ultimately leading to a diagnosis of Creutzfeldt–Jakob variant BSE, better known to the world as
"mad cow disease". Basically, his brain is turning into a useless sponge inside his head. There is no cure, no treatment.
Instead of decades or years, Cameron Smith's life can now be measured in months, at most.
As he undergoes experimental treatments in the hospital, the "hallucinations" return - only the angel with the punk clothes and
pink wings may be more real than he thought. Dulcie tells him that his disease isn't natural, but a byproduct of a scientist's
experiments in traveling across parallel dimensions. Professor X unwittingly opened a wormhole and let unsavory dark matter
entities into our defenseless world, and unless Cameron stops them, the world has less time to live than he does. And since the
boy's disease is linked to the wormhole, there's a chance that Professor X could even cure him, where modern medical science
has thus far failed.
Thus begins a wild, frantic cross-country quest, to a forgotten New Orleans club where lost jazz legends still play, through a
cult dedicated to perpetual bliss at all costs, into the mystery of the world's most popular Inuit band that disappeared
mid-performance, even to the heart of a modern reality TV empire and beyond, in the company of a hypochondriac dwarf and a
garden gnome who may be an cursed Norse god - two weeks in which one dying teenager will finally learn what it means to truly
be alive.
Review
Part of the ever-popular subgenre of surreal stories centered around vaguely horny, underachieving stoner guys experiencing
grand epiphanies, Going Bovine perpetually teeters on the edge of being truly profound and wonder-inducing, but just
kept falling short.
After an opening with some real promise - relating an incident when Cameron was five years old and suffered what could best be
described as an existential crisis on the "Small World" ride in Disney World - it kicked off on a bad foot for me by taking far
too long to introduce Cameron, a teen so disaffected he even bores and irritates himself. He doesn't connect with anyone or
anything; his "favorite" musician is an obscure Portuguese crooner of sad love songs who plays recorder and ukulele, which the
boy only really likes because he laughs at the man's musical efforts without even trying to understand the lyrics, let alone
the emotions behind them. Why is he that way? Even he doesn't know, though it's established fairly early on that our world
pretty much grooms everyone to be as disengaged, as poor at independent thinking, as demanding of instant gratification of
every whim, and as intolerant of even momentary unpleasantness (let alone the discomforts that ultimately drive needed change
and produce greatness) as possible; his English class's course on Don Quixote has the teacher telling the students not
to bother thinking about the book on their own but simply to regurgitate the answers provided in order to pass the
standardized test, and all anyone in his school cares about is popularity and the vapid reality shows cooked up by the Young
Adult TV channel. Slowly, ponderously, the story trudges through Cameron's unpleasant life through his unpleasant point of
view, to the point where I nearly gave up on the audiobook more than once. Only because I had really enjoyed a previous Bray
title (and because I was at work and, frankly, too busy/lazy to pick another title) did I keep going. That, and because the
wild description promised such potentially great and weird and hilarious and wonderful things that I just had to see where
things were going.
Eventually, things manage to kick into gear, when the angel named Dulcie (an unsubtle nod to the Dulcinea who spurred Don
Quixote to his delusional and ultimately tragic life as a would-be knight errant) gives him his quest... with the condition
that he takes his hospital roommate, classmate Gonzo (a fellow sometimes-pothead with dwarfism, half-crushed under the thumb
of an overprotective mother), with him. By following a series of random-but-possibly-not encounters and clues, Cameron and
Gonzo strike out on a bold quest to save the world (and possibly Cameron's life), with periodic encounters with
increasingly-violent fire giants and visits from Dulcie to keep the dying boy going when he grows discouraged or
disillusioned. In the nature of similar tales, the universe seems to go out of its way to provide guides, instructive
obstacles, and lessons specifically for our confused but desperate protagonist, along with innumerable Themes and Metaphors
and Pounded In So Hard The Nail Emerges From The Far Side Of The Earth Messages about Life, the Universe/Multiverse (quantum
physics figure in, as they so often do in metaphysical-leaning tales these days), and all that big stuff. It all builds up
to an intense showdown with Cameron's arch-enemy, the Wizard of Reckoning, whose identity is not nearly so mysterious to
anyone who has read or watched remotely similar stories, capped by a finale that pulled one of my personal pet-peeve least
favorite "twists", which cost it a solid star in the ratings.
At times, the commentary was razor sharp and the episodes darkly humorous, sprinkled with moments peculiarly beautiful and
even meaningful, but at least as often as not things felt contrived and heavy-handed. It didn't help that Cameron
frequently proved obtuse and bumbling (despite glowing neon signs pointing out the way forward or trying to convey the
lesson he was supposed to be learning), and not in an endearing way. Add to that a vague sense that some elements and ideas
were set up and never adequately tied in or followed through on, and I wound up disappointed.
