beauty contests

The competition gets fierce as members of the Baby-sitters Club get involved in helping their charges prepare for the Little Miss Stoneybrook contest.

After her father runs off with a dental hygienist, Raymie Clarke decides it is up to her to repair her family. She plans to win the Little Miss Central Florida Tire competition so her father will see her picture in the paper and come home. However, Raymie has competition in Beverly Tapinski and Louisiana Elefante. All of the girls want to win the pageant for different reasons, and none ever imagined they would become friends.

When the school has a Princess of the Fair contest for a student embodying the qualities of Harriet Tubman, Jasmine Benson will stop at nothing to win.

It is 1983 and Vanessa Martin, a thirteen-year-old African American girl in Newark's public housing, dreams of following in the footsteps of the first black Miss America, Vanessa Williams; but the odds are against her until a new teacher at school organizes a beauty pageant and encourages Vanessa to enter.

Dubbed Dumplin' by her former beauty queen mom, Willowdean has always been at home in her own skin. Her thoughts on having the ultimate bikini body? Put a bikini on your body. With her all-American-beauty best friend, Ellen, by her side, things have.

Hoping that if she wins a local beauty pageant her father will come home, Raymie practices twirling a baton and performing good deeds as she is drawn into an unlikely friendship with a drama queen and a saboteur.

The competition gets fierce as members of the Baby-sitters Club get involved in helping their charges prepare for the Little Miss Stoneybrook contest.

It is 1983 and Vanessa Martin, a thirteen-year-old African American girl in Newark's public housing, dreams of following in the footsteps of the first African American Miss America, Vanessa Williams; but the odds are against her until a new teacher at school organizes a beauty pageant and encourages Vanessa to enter.

"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 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"--From the publisher's web site.

"Arthur doesn't always remember where he buried his bone, or what he was doing before he started scratching his ear, but he never forgets three importants facts: Bacon is delicious. He loves his humans, twins Bro and Harmony, with all his heart, and Queenie the Cat is out to destroy him. When Queenie the Cat wins first place in a feline beauty contest at the county fair, Arthur expects her to be snootier than ever. Yet when Queenie returns from the fair, she seems oddly nice and sociable, almost like she's had a personality change. The humans chalk up Queenie's good mood to her recent win, but Arthur knows the truth. He can tell from the smell that this friendly Queenie is an imposter. But before he can decide what to do, Cuthbert the clown, the only person who knows what's really going on, goes missing. Can Arthur solve a mystery on his own? Or will he have to accept that he needs Queenie as much as he needs bacon?"--Adapted from dust jacket.