Airhead, 2008
April 28th, 2009 
Airhead
By Meg Cabot
Point, 2008
337 pages
This review contains a spoiler about halfway down!
“It all comes down to the locus of identity. Just what is the locus—or perceived location—of our identities…our souls, as it were? Is it the brain? Or is it the heart and body?”
That is the age-old question that lies at the heart of metaphysics; what makes us us? Philosophers and theologians have been asking it and arguing over it for literally thousands of years. To the delight of my philosophy professor heart, Meg Cabot also tackles it in her young adult book, Airhead.
Emerson Watts is 17, smart, into video games, and along with her best friend and secret crush, Chris, disdains the zombies of the world. Zombies, of course, are the pretty, popular, empty-headed cheerleaders and jocks who seem to be put on the earth to make regular girls like Em feel inadequate. The Zombie Queen of all the world is 17-year-old supermodel Nikki Howard, whose too-perfect face graces the cover of every fan magazine Em’s little sister, Frida, brings into the house.
Em is content with her less-than-supermodel appearance, though she is fascinated from time to time with the effect such girls have on boys. And if she occasionally sneaks peeks at her sister’s fashion magazines to get pointers, nobody has to be any the wiser. It doesn’t seem to be helping her get Chris to notice her as anything more than a pal.
And then tragedy strikes. Her mother forces her to accompany her sister to an event where Nikki Howard herself will be making an appearance. Em and Chris pass the time mocking the zombies until Em looks up and sees Frida and Nikki beneath a plasma screen that is hanging from the ceiling—and about to fall. She runs and pushes her out of the way, and it falls on Em instead.
Em wakes up a long time later, and—long story short—finds that she has received a full-body transplant. To save her life, her parents have consented to allow her brain to be transplanted into a body that suffered an aneurysm at the same time as Em had her accident—and in fact, at the same place. The “viable whole-body donor” is Nikki Howard.
Em, to her horror, has woken up in the body of the Queen of the Zombies. She has also discovered that she, because she has Nikki’s body, is legally obliged to fulfill Nikki’s modeling contract. And she discovers that the entire world thinks that Emerson Watts is dead.
The rest of the story is about Em’s struggle to live in a body that others have a claim on, while still holding on to some sense of herself. The lawyer who represents the company Nikki models for informs her,
“What I am trying to explain, Miss Watts, is that approximately thirty-four days ago, Emerson Watts—according to the current definition of the word as mandated by the laws of the state of New York—died.”
“Wait,” I said. “So according to the state of New York, I’m dead?”
“Emerson Watts is dead,” he corrected me.
“But…I’m Emerson Watts,” I cried.
“Are you?” he asked, with a little smile.
“Yes,” I said, leaning forward in my chair. “Yes…Are you really going to sit there and tell me that I’m dead, and that Nikki Howard is still alive?”
“Not at all. What I’m telling you, Miss Watts, is that you are Nikki Howard.”
Who is she after all? Her new body and the new life she’s now committed to do start to influence her, but she still finds herself longing for the things Emerson likes and Emerson is good at. She doesn’t fit into either life very well at first.
The most poignant part of the book is when the new Nikki arranges to “go back to school” at Em’s old high school. She encounters Chris, who of course thinks that Emerson is dead. He has changed drastically, lost his humor and his sarcastic edge, and cut his hair. He no longer plays the video game they spent hours on end playing together. Part of her grieves to see his pain, and part of her secretly rejoices to see proof of how much he cared for her.
Unfortunately, the book ends practically in the middle of the scene, with almost nothing resolved. Emerson/Nikki is beginning to adjust to her new two-for-one life, and she is trying to incorporate new friends with old family. She brings one of her modeling friends home to meet her parents…and the book ends.
And we are bid to buy the sequel—which is not yet published.
After all her skillful engaging the reader in the story, it feels cheap to leave us hanging with nothing at all resolved. The reader can’t help but think that Cabot is taking the short cut to boosting her book sales. The thing is, she doesn’t have to take such an unworthy tack; the books characters and premise would have done it on their own merit.
