David Valdes Greenwood

It's not exactly as wide-ranging as the subtitle implies, but as a portrait of small-town Louisiana festival queens, this book can't be beat. Valdes follows four girls who are both competitors and friends as they vie for various festival crowns: Frog Festival, Cotton Festival, Crawfish Festival,etc.. Valdes explores the importance of the festival queen both to the competitors and to the towns, particularly after the hurricane devastation of Ike, Rita, and Gustav. The book is engaging, honest, and positive, as any good festival queen should be.… (meer)

There are four kinds of pageants: festival, civic, scholarship, and glitz. The most familiar to us are Miss America and Miss USA, which are considered “scholarship” pageants. The other pageants many have become familiar with are the “glitz” ones with titles like Miss Super Cutie. The Rhinestone Sisterhood takes us for an inside look at the world of festival queens, focusing on four: the Frog, Fur, Cotton and Cattle Queens of Louisiana. These hard-working young women juggle school, jobs, and public relations responsibilities promoting their festivals and local industries. They lead parades, chase greased pigs, kiss frogs, feed calves, and eat all manner of local foods. In the case of the Fur Queen, who represents an area devastated by recent hurricanes, she takes some of her “sisters of the sash” on a tour of Cameron Parish to see the damage firsthand.

The Rhinestone Sisterhood is a highly entertaining, fast-paced read, filled with suspense and laughter, disappointment and triumph. You will never look at pageant queens in quite the same way!… (meer)