Airhead by Meg Cabot_Review

[Portable_Panther]

Meg Cabot’s Airhead is a must-read for anyone who likes YA science-fiction. Cabot captures readers’ attention with Emerson Watts, one of the most unpopular girls in her school. Emerson likes online video games, her best friend Christopher, and intelligence. She hates idiocy, supermodels, and sometimes her little sister who has characteristics of both. Unfortunately her world is about to be turned upside down with readers along for the ride. Although Airhead’s plot starts off slow, it transitions into a fast-paced drama that will have feminists everywhere singing praises.

If you’re like Emerson Watts those snooty, preppy girls at school drive you crazy. Now imagine if you were thrown into one of their bodies—and you couldn’t tell anyone. That is exactly where Emerson Watts finds herself in Meg Cabot’s Airhead, the first of the Airhead Series trilogy. Only it’s worse: Em’s brain is transferred into the body of Nikki Howard, the most famous supermodel in the US. Now adored by a myriad of men, Em only seeks the attention of one: Christopher, her best friend who thinks Em is deceased. Now she has to find a way to tell him without Stark Enerprises, Nikki’s (and now Em’s) employer, finding out.

Airhead starts off a little bit slow, easing readers into Em’s initial world and then into Nikki’s—as Em, of course. After Em is transferred into Nikki’s body (for lack of a better word) things begin to pick up. Cabot never really allows readers to know exactly what the real Nikki was like. On top of Em’s own problems, she now has to uncover Nikki’s past secrets and find solutions for those as well. Small hints from her friends and many male companions give Em and the audience members glances here and there, but a complete description is never given. In doing this, Cabot creates an air of mystery: is Em now expected to be unintelligent and mean or sweet and naïve? How can she be herself and be Nikki Howard? These questions will spur readers to the next page, bringing them to the end before they quite realize it.

One notable characteristic of Airhead is that it certainly promotes feminist thinking and deconstructs stereotypes. Em is a very intelligent teenager: she studies hard, expects to become a professor, and firmly believes that make-up and hair-styling is a waste of time. To Em, Nikki Howard is the epitome of why females are statistically fewer in number in science and math careers and why so many young females (her sister included) feel it necessary to keep up with the latest Cosmopolitan but not their schoolwork. When she becomes Nikki, however, she begins to realize that modeling is no walk in the park, that people she thought were thoughtless zombies have souls, and that looking good actually has some perks. For these reasons, Airhead is a great novel for teenage girls.

Meg Cabot’s novel is an enjoyable read and will inevitably lead booklovers to pick up Airhead’s sequel, Being Nikki. The book does begin a little slow, but it soon becomes an avalanche of drama that will make readers laugh, sigh, and fume. It also promotes positive perceptions regarding females. Next time you’re at the library pick it up and find out just what, exactly, can go wrong when a girl like Em is transferred into a model’s body.

[Aiysha_W]

I loved Airhead! I managed to get hold of all three books and it's a brilliant trilogy! Nice in depth review!

[Portable_Panther]

Thanks a bunch, Aiysha! I finally got a hold of the other two in the series and loved them; I'm glad to hear someone else enjoyed them as much as i did!

-- 01 Dec 2013, 16:11 --

Thanks a bunch, Aiysha! I finally got a hold of the other two in the series and loved them; I'm glad to hear someone else enjoyed them as much as I did!