The President's Daughter by Ellen Emerson White

Meghan Powers is an average sixteen-year-old with two younger brothers, busy parents, and good friends. Though she's average, her mother, powerful senator Katharine Vaughn Powers, is anything but. When the senator decides to run for and eventually becomes the first female president, Meg has to deal with constant secret service protection, media appearances, moving to Washington D.C. and attending a new school, and seeing her already busy mom even less than before. How does she tell the most powerful woman in the world that she hates her job?

This was a really cute book with a timely premise. I loved the way Meg and her family interacted -teasing each other, cracking jokes, but there never being any doubt at how much they love each other. In a lot of books, the parents are just sort of there, but don't really have personalities or play a role. In The President's Daughter, however, everyone has a distinct personality and deals with the pressures of the campaign in a different way. Meg, as most teenagers would be I would imagine, spent most of the time being embarrassed about all the attention.

One of my favorite aspects about the book was the way Meg hides her interest in politics. She doesn't want it to make her seem snobby or that she is interested just because her mother is a politician, but she regularly surprises her parents with knowledge of what was going on in the world and was usually seen reading a political book like All the President's Men. She's more similar to her mother than she'd ever admit.

Part of what makes the book so cute is that it's so outdated. It was published in 1984, before CNN and the advent of the 24 hour news cycle, so anyone who is living now is going to laugh at the Powers family's campaign which lasts just several months, is scandal free, and (the biggest difference) the family is treated with respect by the press. Meg is able to go to school and on dates (albeit with Secret Service protection) with no Perez Hilton, US Weekly, or Access Hollywood reporting on every detail of her life. Sure, it's tough being the new kid in school, especially when your mom is the President of the United States, but I think we all know how much worse things could be.

This is the first in a series of books and I'll definitely be checking out the second one at some point. The President's Daughter is cute, funny, and highly readable.

http://thechickmanifesto.blogspot.com/2009/06/presidents-daughter-by-ellen-emerson.html