Title: Airhead
Author: Meg Cabot [website] [twitter]
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
Publisher: Point (an imprint of Scholastic)
Source: Purchase
Parental Warning: light references to alcohol and sexuality

“Well, you’d probably have screamed, too, if the face you saw looking back at you from a mirror belonged to someone else.  Not just someone else, but someone whose face happened to be plastered on magazines and the sides of buses and phone booths all over town.  Wearing nothing but a bra and a pair of panties.”

Summary (from the publisher):
Emerson Watts didn’t even want to go to the new So-Ho Stark Megastore grand opening and had zero interest in meeting the newly appointed Face of Stark, teen supermodel sensation Nikki Howard.

But how was Em to know that disaster would strike, changing her — and life as she’d known it — forever?  One bizarre accident later, and Em Watts, always the tomboy, never the party princess, is no longer herself.  Literally.

Now getting her best friend, Christopher, to notice she’s actually a girl is the least of Em’s problems.

But what Em’s pretty sure she’ll never be able to accept might just turn out to be the one thing that’s going to make her dreams come true.

Opinion:
My first Meg Cabot read, Airhead was a perfect blend of entertaining and emotional.  Don’t get me wrong, this book wasn’t dark and moody but it did have it’s share of the typical teenaged angst that comes with a young girl seeking out her true identity.  Particularly given the outer body experience of being both Em Watts, resident outcast, and Nikki Howard, supermodel extraordinaire.

Airhead had a straightforward plot, with very few surprises for this reader.  I think some of that lack of surprise comes as a result of my age.  I suspect that younger girls who pick this up will be more able to ride unsuspectedly into some of the twists and turns.  This isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy the plot because I did, very much so in fact.  The story (which I won’t outline here so you can experience it for yourself) was captivating to me.  This is mainly due to the endearing characters Cabot built.  Even the quirky sidekick LuLu wasn’t nearly as annoying as one would suspect.

Speaking of characters, Em is written expertly.  She is all piss and vinegar at the outset.  Fighting social injustice and not at all interested in conforming to the in-crowd at her school, she’s got her best friend Christopher at her side and that is all she needs.  Happy to be with him and playing video games she doesn’t feel any need to slim down, polish up or dumb down.  It is this attitude that creates a scenario whereby Em navigates a series of valuable life lessons.

How Em weaves through her double life is both courageous and heartbreaking — the distance from her true family, the care she gives those used to Nikki’s formerly bitchy ways, and the struggle to clue the one person she cherishes most in on the secret of who she really is — makes Airhead a wonderful read.  Even better is the fact that all of this soul searching and positive change is done in the least preachy way possible thanks to Cabot’s wit and charm.

The first in a trilogy, I was glad that I already had the remaining two on hand when I read the first.  The story is so endearing and captivating I had to read all three straight through.  This is a series young girls will assuredly enjoy but so will their mothers.