Rating: 
Summary: Miss America Family : Just Plain Depressing
Review: If the author's goal in writing "Miss America Family" was to depress her readers with the synical rantings of a mentally ill former beauty queen and her dysfunctional family, she succeeded!
I read this book in just 2 sittings as it is fairly large print and not excruciatingly long. I kept looking for the silver lining or the pot of gold to sweep away the dark cloud over the lives of these characters and never found them! For those who like dark journeys with no light at the end of the tunnel, I highly recommend
"Miss America . . ." for the rest of you, pass on this one!
Rating: 
Summary: engrossing tale about coming-of-age
Review: In 1987, Ezra is the teenaged son of Pixie, a former Miss New Jersey. Ezra's father sees him once a year, and the rest of the time he has his loud obnoxious stepfather Dilworth and cute half-sister Mitzie. Because Ezra was part of Pixie's life from before Dilworth and Mitzie, he and Pixie have a strong strange bond. There are many secrets and omissions, and it all comes to a head when Pixie shoots Dilworth in the middle of the night. Like a Greek chorus, Ezra tells us at the beginning that this will happen, and the first part of the book is spent trying to explain Pixie and how she came to be a dentist's wife in suburban Delaware when she set out to be so much more. The chapters alternate between Pixie and Ezra for the entire book, telling of what is going on now and in the past from their own perspectives, trying to piece together what is going on in the present and why they are who they are. It's a sad book at times but not without its humor.
Rating:
Summary: The Miss America Family is dark, funny, beautifully written
Review: In The Miss America Family (now out in paperback), Julianna Baggott has blown past an already high bar set by her first novel, Girl Talk, which was both a literary success and a bestseller. You can read a synposis of the book in other reviews, and it's a great story--you'll want to know what the main characters Pixie the aging beauty queen and her sickly, sarcastic son Ezra have to say and what happens to them. So let me just focus on the incredible experience it is to read this book. It wakes you up, flings you out of your normal ways of seeing, and the familiar no longer seems quite what it was anymore. Here's a few lines from one of the many pages I've bookmarked: "The room is filled with white moths, blurry, so thick with wings that I can barely breathe. I would whisper to my brother now, if I could, that my father was not the enemy, that I was not a country to be saved. Stop here, I'd tell him, with everyone as they are. And I try to stop, too, looking at my kids, my husband, stumbling down the hall. We are all real, suddenly obviously ourselves in a room. The moths escape through open windows. And it's like looking through the curve of clear water in a glass jar. I slip into my body, the tight fit of being stitched into this skin." Do yourself a favor and get this book. Read it--you'll fly through it because you won't want to stop--and then read it again.
Rating:
Summary: Love love love Julianna!
Review: Julianna's books just [draw] you in. Her most recent.."The Miss America Family" put me right in the novel along side of Pixie and Ezra and the rest of the characters. What I most loved was the availablity of palpable feelings from these intricate figures. Ezra is the kind of character who makes you feel as if you arent the only one who doesn't understand their place in this world. Pixie makes you think that even if you may think you know who you are...you may just be wrong. I loved how even though both of their lives were dramtically changed by tragedy and heartache that they didnt give up on each other; that in the end they were just a "normal family". I recommend this delight to any and all!
Rating:
Summary: Excellent!
Review: This isn't the type of book I would normally pick up and read, but I was pleasantly surprised. "The Miss America Family" is very well written - at times hilarious and at times heartwrenching. Julianna Baggott's style of alternating between Ezra and Pixie's points of view gives a lot of depth to the characters. Baggott makes situations, seemingly very strange on the surface, seem not so strange or even normal upon closer examination. This novel made me look at my own family a little bit differently. Maybe they're not so weird, after all.
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