Homicide & Halo-Halo

Homicide & Halo-Halo by Mia P. Manansala, 279 pages

Lila is still dealing with the aftermath of her ex being murdered in her family's restaurant when she's asked to be the third judge in her small town's popular beauty pageant. While she's reluctant to do it, Lila agrees, since she's a past winner of the pageant and she has a new cafe to promote. Unfortunately, just as the multi-event pageant gets rolling, one of Lila's fellow judges turns up murdered, and Lila's cousin Bernadette is the primary suspect. Once again, Lila's pulled into solving a murder to help save her family.

This mystery series (start with Arsenic & Adobo) is fun, funny, and filled with mouthwatering descriptions of Filipino food (thankfully, there are recipes at the end!). But this second volume also has a lot to say about grief, trauma, and allowing yourself to heal. Manansala balances the fun and the serious really well, and turns out an excellent novel in the process. I'll definitely be reading more of this series!

Beauty Queens

Beauty Queens by Libba Bray, 396 pages
A 2014 YALSA Popular Paperback for Young Adults

A plane carrying the fifty contestants of the Miss Teen Dream pageant crashes on an island, immediately cutting the competition to fourteen. Faced with the ultimate challenge - surviving while still looking fabulous - they quickly assimilate to island life, channeling their skills and knowledge into building huts, setting up fishing lines, and putting together weapons out of bamboo shoots and liquid foundation. For most of our contestants, island life is what they need to get past the problems in the lives they've left behind. But hidden on the island is a secret base for the Corporation, the sponsors of the pageant, ready to put in motion a plan to expand their business to the Republic of ChaCha, a country led by the dictator MoMo B. ChaCha, who the United States has sanctions against, and the girls find that they just might be caught in the middle.

I've ready Beauty Queens before, but when I saw that it was on the reading challenge, I knew I had to read it again. I know I say this a lot in my reviews, but I love this book. This book is like Lord of the Flies meets satire with a healthy dose of feminism and anti-globalization added into the mix. For the girls, living on the island gives them the power they need to realize that being pretty is okay, but it's also good to be yourself and to not let others determine your life for you. And then there's the Corporation, which manufactures everything from TV shows to beauty products, in effort to control society as much as they cheaply can (the commercial breaks are probably the most hilarious parts of this, especially the one for Maxi-Pad Pets). It's a crazy story, told at a frenetic pace, but full of humor. It's like the movie Drop Dead Gorgeous, but in book form and even better. If you're looking for something fun and fluffy but with a serious note to it, you can't do better than Beauty Queens.