"Sometimes I think high school is just something society puts teenagers through as a sort of test to see if we've got the stamina to handle the real world.
It's a test I'm pretty sure I'm failing."
(Emerson Watts)
I expected Airhead to be awkwardly hilarious. I also expected over-the-top narrations and dramatic internal monologues. I got exactly what I expected!
In Airhead, our main character Emerson Watts, a tomboy, finds herself in Nikki Howard's - a celebrity model's - body, after a freak accident. Emerson now has to deal with the fact that she's in Nikki's body and is living Nikki's life.
The characters in Airhead are extremely stereotypical. I had hopes that they would show an unconventional side to them, but I was sorely disappointed. I also expected more from Emerson. She's a braniac and a tomboy who dislikes the popular mean girls and airheads. When she becomes Nikki, I expected her to start questioning her views about airheads, mean girls and the fashion industry. Instead Airhead focuses on the many different love interests in Nikki's life and Emerson pining over her best friend and crush, Christopher, while in Nikki's body.
Airhead contains many serious themes such as feminism, celebrity life, medical ethics and the influence of companies and industries. Airhead didn't fully explore any of these themes and I didn't expect it to. They are just subplots to the main plot of Nikki's life.
The main problem with Airhead is that it reads like the first novel of a series. The main point of Airhead is to set up the characters and environment for events that will take place in Being Nikki and Runaway . While reading Airhead, I anxiously waited for something to happen and not much did. Things only start picking up in the last two-three chapters and in order to know more, I have to read Being Nikki.
I read Airhead because I wanted to laugh and be entertained. The premise is interesting and has a lot of potential, but the plot seems to be going somewhere at a tortoise pace. The reason Airhead was written is so that it could serve its purpose as the first book in a series. It doesn't do much else.
"If high school was supposed to be the best years of my life - at least so far - I was truly destined to have a sucky adulthood." (Emerson Watts)