The queue for the audition snakes around a private clinic in a smog-choked northern city, hundreds of teenage girls in cropped tops, all of them with the same idea about showing their stomachs. Inside the studio, twenty at a time are lined up against the back wall and photographed. Then a producer reads out seven names. Those girls, she explains, are not what the show is looking for. They have not sung a note. One of them bursts into tears. Taryn Beck, the narrator of Survival Show by Juno Dawson, watches them go and understands exactly why: they are not pretty enough to be idols. She also realises, with a flush of shame, that she is relieved it was not her.
The Survival Show and the Girls Inside It
Taryn is seventeen, a flood refugee living in a camp of trailers in the Scottish Borders, in a Britain battered by war, epidemics and rising seas. Her brother is seriously ill and his medicine keeps failing to arrive. The government, meanwhile, will pay anyone who agrees to be put to death, a scheme called Project Population that has been adopted around the world.
Starmaker is the planet’s most watched programme, a talent show that forms a new pop group every season. Some years ago it partnered with Project Population to boost ratings. Now the ten finalists live in a mansion in Media City, perform live every week, and the girls with the fewest votes face the judges. One of them walks into a glass chamber and does not walk out.
Survival Show by Juno Dawson follows Taryn from that first audition through a gruelling dance boot camp in a crumbling London mansion to the house itself. It is a thriller, but the heart of it is the friendships: with Leela, a cool, kind German trainee with a secret she has not told the producers; with Suki, a fifteen-year-old Australian who never stops talking; and eventually with rivals she was sure she would hate.
Taryn herself is the reason the book works. She is funny, sweary, sceptical and very British, the kind of narrator who notices the price of a producer’s designer jumper while she is being asked to look poor for the cameras. Her family back at the camp, a worn-out father, a bossy older sister and the sick younger brother she adores, give her something real to fight for, and their scenes are some of the warmest in the novel. Survival Show by Juno Dawson also breaks up the chapters with tabloid articles, fan comments and contract clauses, which give a group plenty to compare: the story the girls live, and the one the public is sold.
What the Camera Wants
Much of the book’s power comes from how clearly it shows the machinery. Every room has hidden cameras. The girls are given scripted questions, fed lines in interviews and made to redo their screams when a star enters because they screamed on the wrong beat. There are calorie targets, a bathroom scale placed in front of the fridge, and makeovers that turn each girl into a branded doll, down to a twelve-inch figure in the shops.
Dawson is sharp about the double standards. The girls are told to be sexy but never slutty, to be friends but to win, to be themselves but to play the character they have been assigned. One trainee’s chances collapse after she is photographed with a boy at a party; the rest learn that a sulky face on camera can cost them votes. Survival Show by Juno Dawson asks a reading group to notice how familiar most of this is, even without the pyramid.
Reading Juno Dawson Against the Real Thing
Adults in a group may want to look up the real-world format that inspired all this. Korean music companies have long trained teenage idols for years before debut, and televised survival shows rank them week by week. Dawson’s acknowledgements describe her pitch as The Hunger Games meeting the Spice Girls, and she is clearly both a fan of pop and furious about what the industry can do to the young people who make it.
Not every choice lands. A few reservations for anyone choosing it:
The satire is often blunt, with the same jokes and targets returning again and again.
The dystopian world arrives as a long list of disasters rather than a place the reader slowly learns.
Taryn’s romance with an older star who also judges her is handled with less scrutiny than the rest of the book.
After a thunderous finale, the aftermath is wrapped up quickly, clearly leaving room for a sequel.
Questions Worth Arguing About
Start with consent. Every contestant signs a contract saying she understands she may die, and several characters later insist that the girls “knew what they signed up for”. Ask the group whether a desperate person can meaningfully consent to something like this, and what the book suggests about who benefits from that argument.
Then ask about fandom. Survival Show by Juno Dawson is full of fans, from little girls holding homemade flags to anonymous commenters tearing the trainees apart. Ask whether the book blames the audience, the industry or both, and whether any member of the group has ever felt uneasy about something they enjoyed watching.
Ask, too, about bodies. The trainees are weighed, put on diets, handed weight-loss injections and discussed endlessly online, and one of the youngest is singled out almost at once. Ask the group how much of that felt exaggerated, and how much felt uncomfortably close to real life.
Finally, ask about the girls themselves. They are forced to compete, rank each other and sometimes betray one another. Ask which friendships survive the house and why, and whether the book’s idea of sisterhood feels earned or hopeful.
For more in this vein, Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins returns to the televised arena with a sharp eye for propaganda and the edit. Scythe by Neal Shusterman imagines a society that has made killing a public duty. The Escape Game by Marissa Meyer and Tamara Moss is set on a reality show already shadowed by a contestant’s death. And our list of dystopian novels has plenty more for groups who want to stay in broken futures.
Where It Leaves You
The book ends, fittingly, with a song. Without giving anything away, it is sung for love rather than for votes, and after everything that has come before, that small choice lands with real force. Survival Show by Juno Dawson can be loud where it should be subtle, and it resolves too much too fast. But its anger is justified, its humour is sharp and its heroine is unforgettable. It gives teenage readers, and the adults who read alongside them, a great deal to argue about, and a clear message underneath the glitter: no dream is worth letting people treat you as disposable.