Emerson Watts (her friends call her Em) is a video game playing tomboy feminist. At her parents’ insistence, Em begrudgingly attends a Stark megastore grand opening with her celebrity-obsessed sister and her geeky best guy friend. A British hearthrob is on hand to serenade the crowd, and one of the world’s hottest young supermodels, Nikki Howard, captures plenty of attention. But when protested with a paintball gun causes a terrible accident, Em wakes up from a coma a month later to find that she barely recognizes herself anymore. Everyone else recognizes her though, because the face staring back at Em in the mirror is not her own…

While the premise of a successful brain transplant requires a LOT of suspended disbelief from the reader, this story offers an intriguing twist on the “prince and the pauper” switch. After Emerson Watts wakes up to discovers that she is an honors student brain trapped in a supermodel body. she may be glad to be alive, but how will she cope in the world of high fashion and celebrity? Can Em admit that Nikki’s life isn’t as vacuous and vapid as it looks on the pages of Cosmo Girl? And will Em ever feel like her new body, Nikki’s body, is her own?

Read Airhead by Meg Cabot to find out more, and if you like the sarcastic humor and cultural commentary of Emerson Watts, check out the next book in the series, Being Nikki, which is new this week at the library!