The Rhinestone Sisterhood: A Journey Through Small Town America, One Tiara at a Time »

Ride a bull. Chat up a Senator. And get your homework in on time. It’s all in a day’s work for a festival queen.

If you assume all pageant queens are airheads who can’t handle geography, or vain girls who like to parade around in bathing suits, then welcome to the alternative universe of America’s festival queens. With titles like Catfish Queen and Swine Queen, and royal duties ranging from leading parades to kissing frogs to doing PR for local industries, these hardworking girls represent the best of what America has to offer: local cultures, unique traditions, and the kind of can-do community spirit that makes Main Street sparkle with promise.

The Rhinestone Sisterhood takes us deep into the world of small-town festival queens to capture the true story of four “sisters of the sash”—the Frog, Fur, Cotton, and Cattle Queens of Louisiana—and their quest to win the ultimate crown, Queen of Queens. Traveling across the state, David Valdes Greenwood introduces us to local queens with lives full of public speaking, pig chases, and pageant politics. We ride with the girls during their one-year reign, where families and boyfriends can be as complicated as judge’s panels, and a queen’s dreams may be at the mercy of a Category 4 hurricane.

High-spirited yet down-home, suspenseful and genuinely moving, The Rhinestone Sisterhood is, at heart, a story of female friendship and rivalry, of triumph and disappointment—not to mention a Frog Queen who just wouldn’t quit. Anyone who has ever wanted to be a princess will feel right at home.