Pretty Ugly

January 15, 2015
Aging beauty queen Miranda forces her preteen daughter to compete in pageants while her pill-popping husband, Ray, a nurse, conducts an affair with the teenage granddaughter of a hospice patient in this first novel from TV writer and producer Butler (Family Guy, etc.). Miranda's own haphazard beauty-contest experience hasn't deterred her from starving her 9-year-old daughter, Bailey, so she can look "sexy" while competing in the Southern United States pageant circuit; Bailey, meanwhile, is binging behind Miranda's back to make herself too fat to compete. Ray, whose brief stint as a doctor was cut short after he killed seven patients at a hospital in Detroit, now works as a nurse to support his debt-ridden family. When he's not accidentally killing patients (his tally is now 365 dead), Ray enjoys sleeping with 17-year-old Courtney right in front of her hospice-bound grandfather. When Courtney gets pregnant and has to pay the state more than $12,000 in back taxes on her now-deceased grandfather's house, Ray's and Miranda's lives become far more complicated-and unexpectedly lucrative-than anyone could have imagined. Pairing no-holds-barred character studies with pointed cultural commentary (on texting: "It was as if the world had finally figured out the perfect way to communicate, then decided to do so using only Prince lyrics"), Butler manages to elicit laughter and winces in equal measure. The situations are styled with a kind of absurdist realism; although extreme, nothing that takes place is impossible, partly because Butler is dexterous in the way he intertwines his characterization and plotting. Repugnant, tasteless and often behaving illegally, Butler's characters are the human embodiment of misguided desire. Butler's excellent observational skills and hilarious prose make this a simultaneously funny and awful satire of thwarted ambition.

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February 1, 2015
Television writer Butler (Family Guy, The Neighbors) brilliantly skewers the child pageant circuit in his laugh-out-loud debut. As a teen, Kentucky-born Miranda Ford dreamed of beauty pageant fame and glory, and a seven-month reign as Miss Daviess County only whetted her appetite. Now in her late thirties, Miranda lives through her nine-year old daughter, Bailey, who has been competing in pageants since she was a baby. Bailey doesn't share her mother's ambitions and has secretly been binge eating in the hopes of getting too big to compete. Frustrated, Miranda puts Bailey on a strict diet, but she is also looking ahead: she is pregnant with her fourth child. Thrilled to learn that she is having a girl. Miranda promptly transfers her pageant-glory dreams to her yet-unborn daughter. Meanwhile, she neglects her two sons and her husband, Ray, a male nurse who has just impregnated the 17-year-old daughter of one of his hospice patients. The disastrous denouement inevitably comes when Miranda finally gets her long-hoped-for reality show. A hilarious, smart satire.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)