Sound advice on how to enter and perhaps win a beauty contest.

From bestselling, Printz Award-winning author Libba Bray, the story of a plane of beauty pageant contestants that crashes on a desert island.Teen beauty queens. A "Lost"-like island. Mysteries and dangers. No access to emall. And the spirit of fierce, feral competition that lives underground in girls, a savage brutality that can only be revealed by a journey into the heart of non-exfoliated darkness. Oh, the horror, the horror! Only funnier. With evening gowns. And a body count.

Through micro-analysis of language use, this book chronicles young women's pathways to becoming a Tanzanian beauty queen, offering an original perspective on the intersection of language with globalization, nationalism, and inequality in urban East Africa. This compelling linguistic ethnography considers the real-life effects, both on- and off-stage, of language policy, education, and gender dynamics for the women competing in the pageants. While highlighting many contestants' struggles for escape from poverty and patriarchy, the book also emphasizes their creative strategies – linguistic and otherwise – for bettering their lives and shows how people living in a global economic periphery take part in, and sometimes feel left out of, the wider world.

Bárbara Palacios, Miss Universe 1986, Miss Venezuela, and hailed by People en Español as one of the 25 most powerful and influential women of 2014, author and international speaker, opens her heart and shares memories and personal stories from her globe-trotting career as a public figure. Women want to know how to be a good mom, a good friend, a good wife, an excellent professional, and a woman of faith. The author fields questions about these roles all the time. Palacios uses each story as a stepping stone to teach about these topics. She also speaks to women about taboo subjects like domestic violence, facing failure, defending children from abortion, female leadership, and faith in God. The author chose the title of her book to tell women that they can and should dare to be brave and daring to defend values, principles, ethics, and virtues, and to unleash the potential of their talents. She also chose the title as a way of telling her reader, "Dare to discover who you are and be that woman, according to God's original design for you." Palacios wraps up the book by sharing the practices that have made her the woman she is, practices she hopes will help others. She addresses health, internal beauty, faith, and the leadership of entrepreneurial women. She closes the book by telling the story of founding her own organization, called Ser Mujer Líder y Emprendedora Está de Moda [Being a Female Entrepreneurial Leader Is in Vogue], and describing the conferences they have held since 2016 and that she hopes to take around the world soon. In this book, the author seeks to help women leave the past behind and focus on leaving their mark.

Have you ever dreamed of a life full of laughter, love, and sequins … but felt totally clueless about how to make it happen? You’re not alone. Best-selling author and speaker Gala Darling spent years in soul-sucking jobs, battling depression, an eating disorder, and a preference for chaos and disaster—simply because she didn’t know how to create the life she dreamed about. In Radical Self-Love, you’ll discover exactly what makes you so magnificent, and you’ll gain a litany of tools and techniques to help you manifest a life bursting with magic, miracles, bliss, and adventure! Featuring fun homework exercises and cool illustrations, this book will take you from learning to fall madly in love with yourself, to loving others, to making your world a more magical place through style, self-expression, and manifestation. When you love yourself, life is limitless. You can do anything you want. It’s time to throw off the shackles of expectation and judgment, and start living from your heart. It’s time to astound yourself with how beautiful your life can be. It’s time to treat every single day like a celebration! "I believe that radical self-love can go hand in hand with a ruby-red lip. . . . that learning how to love yourself can be a party: streamers, disco balls, helium balloons, and all!" xo, Gala "Radical Self-Love should be on every woman’s bookshelf." — Gabrielle Bernstein

The well-known Kenyan woman writer here tells an exciting story for young readers. The title is one in a series developed to meet the supplementary reading needs of secondary level pupils, and to encourage reading for pleasure. Reminiscent of the proverb that the serpent hisses where sweet birds sing, the story starts when Adela and Keti jokingly enter a village beauty contest - the start of excitement and adventure, fraught with danger and tragedy.

I felt the prick of the needle, but only for a second, because this great rush of warmth quickly followed, encompassing my whole body from my toes right up to the top hair on my head. I couldn't move for a minute as she guided the needle in and out of my vein. When she was done, I felt like I had entered heaven. I looked in the mirror and felt beautiful and confident. I felt this great peace, at last, a warmth, and I knew that everything was going to be okay--and really always had been. Like time had stopped and I was floating on a cloud. "Writing the book, I saw my old dope dealer and bought $1,500 worth of pure heroin--Brown Gold--and started shooting up ten times a day to get the feel of the book. Well, I did, all right. I ended up in Glen Cove General, almost dead. In truth, you make a deal with the Devil. He takes away your pain, but he owns you. You live for the next fix. After a while, it's totally physical; your body has to have it. But I'm off it for good." -- Linda Glovach Young Adults' Choices for 2000 (IRA)

Andrea Jung, the glamorous former head of Avon, was arguably the world's most charismatic and effective CEO, credited with the astonishing turnaround of the venerable brand. Avon's board was filled with tough-minded, successful CEOs and other high achievers, but when Jung walked into a room wearing her Chanel suit, custom- blended lipstick and signature pearls, every head turned and she had them eating out of her hand. She seemed incapable of making a wrong move, until, amid declining sales, an investigation by the SEC, and a brand in crisis she stepped down in late 2012. In Beauty Queen, former Avon VP Deborrah Himsel uses Jung's story as a case study for two timeless leadership questions: What makes great leaders great? And what makes them fail? She explores both Jung's early years of success as well as the combination of missteps that led to her downfall, including her failure to nurture Avon's direct selling channel, the erosion of trust that occurred as a result of frequent decision reversals, and her ignorance of operational details, including how her people secured a license to conduct door-to-door sales in China, that led to a federal investigation. Through interviews with other CEOs, Avon executives past and present, and leadership experts, Hiimsel explores the unique challenges Jung faced as a female Fortune 500 CEO; the thin line between pride and hubris; and the danger of the so-called "halo effect" in our high-stakes times.

"Mamalarang! Witch!" These are words that have followed young Renata for most of her life. Living in the squalor of Manila's Smokey Mountain - a slum within a garbage dump - Renata uses her power to communicate with insects to help her with collecting recyclable rubbish. As her family ekes out a living, the flip side of Manila is one where glamorous Beauty Queens reign supreme. When a flamboyant talent coach spots Renata in the market, he gives her the chance to be plucked from poverty into the heady world of Filipino pageants. But even as she is groomed in poise and beauty, her past and the plight of the poor in Manila haunts her. And her secret power just keeps strengthening. Will the love of a fellow pageant girl help Renata find the strength to set her power free?

"Black is Beautiful!" The words were the exuberant rallying cry of a generation of black women who threw away their straightening combs and adopted a proud new style they called the Afro. The Afro, as worn most famously by Angela Davis, became a veritable icon of the Sixties. Although the new beauty standards seemed to arise overnight, they actually had deep roots within black communities. Tracing her story to 1891, when a black newspaper launched a contest to find the most beautiful woman of the race, Maxine Leeds Craig documents how black women have negotiated the intersection of race, class, politics, and personal appearance in their lives. Craig takes the reader from beauty parlors in the 1940s to late night political meetings in the 1960s to demonstrate the powerful influence of social movements on the experience of daily life. With sources ranging from oral histories of Civil Rights and Black Power Movement activists and men and women who stood on the sidelines to black popular magazines and the black movement press, Ain't I a Beauty Queen? will fascinate those interested in beauty culture, gender, class, and the dynamics of race and social movements.