Select one of the keywords
Cover Girl Confidential    by Beverly Bartlett Amazon.com order for
Cover Girl Confidential
by Beverly Bartlett
Order:  USA  Can
5 Spot, 2007 (2007)
Softcover

Read an Excerpt

* *   Reviewed by Rheta Van Winkle

Poor Addison McGhee! She never realized how important becoming a U.S. citizen would be for her, so she never got around to applying. Who would have thought that someday, in a moment of frustrated anger, she would commit a felony and face deportation to a country she had never seen? After all, since the age of two she had grown up in Nebraska, the law-abiding child of immigrant parents whose accents and actions embarrassed her. She became an all-American girl with the help of a book called Miss Liberty's Guide to Impeccable Assimilation and television, from which she learned English and such important American skills as sarcasm, irony, and teen fashion rules.

While in prison waiting for trial, our heroine recounts the last few years of her life in an attempt to explain her actions to her lawyer. She had risen from obscurity to become a popular TV personality along with her co-hosts Hughes Sinclair and Baxter Bailey. She was even invited to a barbeque at the White House, and her brief encounter with President Briarwood proves to be her undoing, that and her short, doomed marriage which resulted in the felony that landed her in prison. Who would have thought that throwing a flexibility measuring device at your ex-husband on national TV could endanger your green-card status?

Cover Girl Confidential is a light-hearted account of celebrity misbehavior, which manages to sneak in several real problems for immigrants in an entertaining way. Addison is an intelligent girl who does some very dumb things and seems headed for a punishment far more severe than her crime would warrant. Luckily, as we knew it would, all works out for the best in the end. The book is an enjoyable spoof of the tendency of Americans to take their celebrities too seriously and ignore the truly serious tragedies that exist in the world. I enjoyed reading it in spite of myself.

Note: Opinions expressed in reviews and articles on this site are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of BookLoons.

Find more Contemporary books on our Shelves or in our book Reviews