Being a teen superstar supermodel is a lot harder than it looks!

If someone had told me before the accident that being a teen superstar supermodel would be hard, I would have laughed in her face!  Oh yeah, standing around posing for the camera, looking beautiful is hard work-right up there with digging ditches and rocket science! 

Now I know better.  Being gorgeous and onstage 24/7 takes time and energy, especially when you're doing it the way I was.  You see, while I look like Nikki Howard, and live like Nikki Howard, I'm not really Nikki.  I'm Em, Emerson Watts, and my brain is kind of wearing Nikki's body. 

Nikki is the Face of Stark Industries, a huge multibillion dollar corporation that makes cheap knockoffs of anything and everything you can imagine, and since cheap and enviromentally friendly don't go together, it's been the target of a lot of criticism. 

Nikki's face on their products distracted people from all that criticism.  So when I got smashed by a giant plasma TV at one of their store openings, and Nikki collapsed with a brain aneurysm at the same time, they whisked us both away, and when I woke up, my brain was in Nikki's body.  Stark didn't want to lose "The Face," so as soon as I was out of the hospital, I had to start living her life, instead of mine. 

The only people who knew I hadn't died in that accident were my family, and Lulu, Nikki's best friend, and we were saying that Nikki had amnesia from a fall, and didn't recognize anyone.  So all her old boyfriends showed up, hoping for a second chance, sending flowers and emails and ringing her doorbell.  When another hunky guy showed up, saying he was my brother and that our mother had disappeared, I pretty much blew him off the way I'd done all the rest.  But he didn't give up and go away, because he really was Nikki's brother, and figured out almost immediately that I wasn't Nikki and that I didn't know anything about their mother. 

Steven was pretty cute - and he was also pretty desperate - so I agreed to help him figure out what had happened to his mother.  How could I know that helping Steven would get me involved in even more trouble?  No one ever told me that being famous would be this hard!

This booktalk was written by Joni Richards Bodart, university professor, writer, librarian, consultant, and booktalker extraordinaire.

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  Airhead #2: Being Nikki by Meg Cabot Things aren't pretty for Emerson Watts. Em was sure there couldn't be anything worse than being a brainiac the body of a teenaged supermodel. But it turned out she was wrong. Because that supermodel could turn out to have a mother who's gone mysteriously missing, a brother who's shown up on her doorstep demanding answers, a former best friend who's intent on destroying Stark Enterprises to avenge the death of his lost love, and a British heartthrob who's written a song about her that's topping the charts. How can Em balance all that with school, runway shows, and weekend jaunts to St. Johns - especially when she's got ex-boyfriends crawling out of the woodwork who want more than just a photo op; a sister who is headed to the high school cheerleading championships; a company she represents that seems to be turning to the dark side...Not to mention trying to convince the love of her life that models aren't really airheads after all...especially one model in particular. But then, nobody said it was going to be easy being Nikki. $16.99 books;hardcovers | Ages 9-12

  
  Airhead #2: Being Nikki
  Ages 9-12 $16.99
  
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  Airhead #2: Being Nikki Things aren't pretty for Emerson Watts. Em was sure there couldn't be anything worse than being a brainiac the body of a teenaged supermodel. But it turned out she was wrong. Because that supermodel could turn out to have a mother who's gone mysteriously missing, a brother who's shown up on her doorstep demanding answers, a former best friend who's intent on destroying Stark Enterprises to avenge the death of his lost love, and a British heartthrob who's written a song about her that $16.99 Hardcover Book | Grades 7-Up

  
  Airhead #2: Being Nikki
  Grades 7-Up $16.99