Hollywood Holiday: Secrets of My Hollywood Life by Jen Colonita

In an old plot line refurbished from The Prince and the Pauper (Signet Classics) and more recently Audrey Hepburn's Roman Holiday. Kaitlin Burke is the squeaky clean teen actress who has grown up on Family Affairs, a weekly soap in which she plays the good sister foile to the bad girl sister character portrayed by Skylar McKenzie. Sky really is her evil twin in real life, always scrapping for first billing, vying for off-season movie roles, wrangling dates with gorgeous co-stars, and pumping herself for a position on the Entertainment Weekly's "It List."

But when Family Affairs goes on hiatus in April, Kaitlin is ready for an escape from the endless lineup of publicity interviews and spot appearances her pushy parents and publicist Laney have scheduled for every minute of her so-called break. Snagging an anonymous pizza with her non-Hollywood friend, Liz, Kaitlin comes up with a wistful fantasy holiday: a few weeks of regular high school life at Liz's school, the upscale Clark Academy, as a disguised transfer student from England. With her retinue of makeup, hairstyle, and wardrobe experts, and with reluctant permission from her parents and manager, Kaitlin is transformed into Rachel Robbins, junior. With short, nondescript brown bobbed hair, brown contacts, a Brit accent (learned in a previous Disney spy kid role), dorky glasses, and a Discount World wardrobe, Kaitlin/Rachel slips into the spring semester with relative ease, making friends within Liz's circle and even getting attention from the hunky captain of the lacrosse team, Austin Meyers.

All goes well at school, although when Austin becomes her American history tutor, she learns that Sky has no corner on cattiness when she runs up against Austin's girlfriend Lori. Kaitlin manages to juggle both her lives, attending movie premiers and the FA wrap party as the glamorous Kaitlin Burke and scrambling to catch up in French class and write a research paper on the Civil War with Austin's help at school. Still, Kaitlin loves being accepted for herself as Rachel, and eagerly throws herself into working with Liz on planning the annual Spring Fling dance at Clark Academy.

Things start to go wrong when Lori's proposal, Night of a Thousand Stars, is voted in as the theme for the dance, with everyone dressing as their favorite celebrities. When Austin breaks up with Lori and invites Kaitlin to the big event, she's totally thrilled--until he suggests that they dress as Trevor and Kaitlin, America's favorite teen couple from Family Affairs. Ironically then, on the night of the prom, she finds herself as Rachel Robbins dressed as Kaitlin, wearing a Kaitlin Burke gown and a Kaitlin Burke wig. To make the whole thing even stranger, none other than the snarky Skylar McKenzie is making a charitable guest appearance at the dance.

When she arrives at the dance and sees the television vans surrounding the gym, Kaitlin realizes that Sky has managed to get her hands on her cell phone, now knows all, and is about to blow her cover in front of a coast-to-coast audience. It's a showdown of the teen queens (surprise, surprise) which seems right out of a made-for-TV movie. When the dust settles, of course, all's well in Kaitlin-land. Sky comes up looking like the evil manipulator that she is, Kaitlin beats her out for the juicy part in the summer action movie which Sky covets, and Austin finally forgives Kaitlin's deception. (Fade out and roll credits.)

With a wholesome, goodhearted Hollywood princess, Secrets of My Hollywood Life is a light romp through the perils of teen celebrity life. Much less snippy than The Clique and less boy obsessed than the The Gossip Girls, this one should be popular with those 'tween and teen readers raised on Disney sit coms. In fact, there are already two sequels to follow Kaitlin's progress through the publicity wars, Secrets of My Hollywood Life: On Location (Secrets of My Hollywood Life) and Secrets of My Hollywood Life: Family Affairs (Secrets of My Hollywood Life) which take our wholesome heroine through her summer movie-making and back to work on the next season's shooting of Family Affairs.

Although Kaitlin Burke seems impossibly unspoiled for a teen television queen, zipping through this series offers a lot more socially redeeming value than soaking up the latest about Britney or Paris or whoever in the gossip mags, and it's undeniably fun escapist reading.