Anna-Marie McLemore

Tehlor Kay Mejia

Miss Meteor

Sarah Sammis

** spoiler alert **
           I LOVE THIS BOOK. Great characters.

Beyond this two Latinx girls and their families coming together to hopefully win the beauty pageant, the book is filled with a well written cast of interesting and diverse characters. There is good ethnic representation and good queer representation.

My favorite supporting character is Cole who is on a short list of well written transgender characters. His backstory isn't a major plot point. He's never deadnamed. We don't learn when he came out. All of that is said and done and everyone has pretty moved on by the time the novel opens. Yet there are moments of shared history among Cole, Lita and Chicky that give glimpses to those previous moments.

http://pussreboots.com/blog/2021/comm...

This was cute but I wanted it to be a lot more gay

Tatiana Alvarez 

Miss Meteor is a novel centered around a beauty pageant, (hang in there with me - I was skeptical too.) Former best friends, Chicky Quintanilla and Lita Perez, both outsiders in their small town in New Mexico, come up with the idea to join Miss Meteor in hopes that more girls who look and think like them would have a chance of beating the standard beauties. However joining in a beauty pageant also means opening yourself up to both ridicule and truth, not just for Lita who joined as a contestant, but also for Chicky who has agreed (along with her sisters) to help her. 

Both girls have secrets and their bullies do not hesitate to use that against them. In 4th grade, Chicky gave a ring pop to a girl on the bus, the first moment that she realized she liked another girl. However, since then she has been relentlessly bullied for that one instance and has suppressed a vital part of herself. Lita is made of star-dust and not from this earth. Her biggest fear is not belonging and being called an "Alien." She is afraid that people will see right through her, figuratively and literally.

What I liked:
-Pansexual rep. Chicky knows, eventually, that she is crushing on her best friend Junior, who is a guy, but she also still is attracted to other people. Junior supports her choices and encourages her to be who she is. I liked the fact that it validated a relationship between a f/m, where one of the partners is pansexual, that she can still be pans and be in what others see as a "heteronormative" relationship.

-Trans rep. More so than that - being trans was not a personality trait. I don't mean that in a negative way, but I feel like authors spent a great deal of their writing talking about their sexual identity, which is extremely important, but this novel made it seem perfectly normal (which it is!) Just like how cis females or males don't have to constantly remind their readers that they are cis - it is just an accepted fact - Cole was viewed as a man. (I hope this makes sense. It makes sense in my head.)

-Healthy friendships that turn into relationships.

-Breaking the stigma of beauty pageants. 

- Loved that it was written by two different Latinx authors and the POV switched between Chicky and Lita. Both protagonist were very different from each other and I never got confused as to what POV I was reading in.

Things that I didn't like.
-The whole stardust / alien thing. I'm not sure if this was meant to be a metaphor that Lita immigrated to New Mexico and lived with an adopted parent? or if it was talking literally. The magical realism did not do it for me and the message could have been received as well, or better imo, by leaving that out and replacing it with what the author meant. Unless it is meant to be taken literally - then it is definitely not my thing.

-Cole's sister. She's the worst. She's able to accept her trans brother but turns around and makes fun of Chicky for being a "lesbo" which she isn't. I don't know, that character is played out to me, but I know it is reflective apart of some members of society, so I get it.

Overall, this book was an easy read. I would recommend it but with a disclaimer about the magical realism because that would deter a few people.

Jordan Heustis

This is another book that I think would be great as a movie! I didn’t really vibe with the whole stardust thing but I loved everything else! I really would’ve loved if Cole had been one of our pov’s too. I would love to know more about him!

Paige Green

Disclaimer: I received this book for free from Once Upon a Book Club to sponsor their box! Thanks! All opinions are my own.

Book: Miss Meteor

Author: Tehlor Kay Mejia and Anna-Marie McLemore

Book Series: Standalone

Rating: 5/5

Diversity: transgender character, pansexual main character, other LGBT members mentioned, mostly Hispanic characters

Recommended For...: LGBT readers, YA readers, Magical Realism lovers, contemporary readers

Publication Date: September 22, 2020

Genre: YA Magical Realism

Recommended Age: 16+ (homophobic remarks, Language, Slight sexual content, Racism, sexism, Alcohol usage mentioned, Attempted rape)

Publisher: HarperTeen

Pages: 390

Synopsis: There hasn’t been a winner of the Miss Meteor beauty pageant who looks like Lita Perez or Chicky Quintanilla in all its history. But that’s not the only reason Lita wants to enter the contest, or why her ex-best friend Chicky wants to help her. The road to becoming Miss Meteor isn’t about being perfect; it’s about sharing who you are with the world—and loving the parts of yourself no one else understands. So to pull off the unlikeliest underdog story in pageant history, Lita and Chicky are going to have to forget the past and imagine a future where girls like them are more than enough—they are everything.

Review: Overall I really loved this book! The writing was beautiful and the plot was intriguing enough. The characters were very well developed and I loved the world building. I also felt that the book did well with the dual POV. The authors wrote beautifully together and the story and writing felt so seamless together.

The only issues I had were that the book was a bit too slow in places and that sometimes the book jumped around a little and it got confusing, especially towards the end. 

Verdict: Highly recommend!

Miss Meteor

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