The Cover Girl - by Amy Rossi (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

"Thrilling and glamorous as its runways and backstage parties, The Cover Girl is also heartbreaking and redemptive with an ending that made me cry. Birdie is a singular, unforgettable character whose story encapsulates so much of what led up to the #MeToo movement, and why the movement was so necessary."
--Ana Reyes, New York Times bestselling author of The House in the Pines

Find them early enough, and they will always be her girls.

Birdie Rhodes was only thirteen when legendary modeling agent Harriet Goldman discovered her in a department store and transformed her into one of Harriet's Girls. What followed felt like the start of something incredible, a chance for shy Birdie to express herself in front of the camera. But two years later, she meets a thirty-one-year-old rock star, and her teenage heart falls hard as he leads her into a new life, despite Harriet's warnings. Then, as abruptly as it began, it's over, like a lipstick-smeared fever dream. Birdie tries hard to forget that time--starting over in Paris, in the dying embers of the LA punk scene, in Boston at the height of the AIDS crisis. She's not that person anymore. At least, that's what she's been telling herself.

Decades later, Birdie lives a quiet life. She works modest gigs, takes Pilates and mostly keeps to herself. Maybe it's not the glamor she once envisioned, but it's peaceful. Comfortable. Then a letter arrives, inviting Birdie to celebrate Harriet's fifty-year career. Except Birdie hasn't spoken to her in nearly thirty years--with good reason.

Almost famous, almost destroyed, Birdie can only make her own future if she reckons with her past--the fame, the trauma, the opportunities she gave up for a man who brought her into a life she wasn't ready for. Just like she's not ready now. But the painful truth waits for nobody. Not even Birdie Rhodes.

For fans of My Dark Vanessa and Taylor Jenkins Reid, this striking debut novel explores the dizzying fallout of being seen and not heard in a high-stakes industry that leaves no silhouette unscathed.

Review Quotes

"Thrilling and glamorous as its runways and backstage parties, The Cover Girl is also heartbreaking and redemptive with an ending that made me cry. Birdie is a singular, unforgettable character whose story encapsulates so much of what led up to the #MeToo movement, and why the movement was so necessary. I look forward to reading whatever Amy Rossi writes next!"
--Ana Reyes, New York Times bestselling author of The House in the Pines

"Who's to blame when a beautiful girl becomes a rock star's muse before she can even drive? The Cover Girl is a haunting meditation on the price of fame, the slipperiness of memory, and the long tail of #MeToo. Almost Famous meets She Said, this book will stay with you long after its final page."
--Alison B. Hart, author of April May June July

"The Cover Girl is an unforgettable, unputdownable, well-told retrospective that pierces the mesmerizing facade of rock star worship, and the glitter and glamour of the beauty and fashion industries. Amy Rossi crafts an intimate story of how one woman confronts her fractured past to heal, emerge and move forward."
--Monica Chenault-Kilgore, author of The Jewel of the Blues

"The Cover Girl is not just the glossy coming-of-age story of a model and muse. It's an immersive work of historical fiction, Rossi masterfully capturing the bombastic seventies and eighties, and an expertly woven retrospection, toggling between teenage Birdie Rhodes, blasting onto the modeling scene, and her older self, relegated to acting in drug ads. Rossi circles the enigmatic phenomena that is the It Girl, on the arm of a powerful and significantly older rocker, immortalized in song but forever unknowable, even to her older self. The result is a propulsive and richly layered story that shines a light on the women and girls who become collateral damage for the music, even as the men rock on, and a panoptic reflection on what happens to the cover girl after the world has forgotten her."
--Katie M. Flynn, author of The Companions and Island Rule

"What happens when you learn to be who other people want you to be long before you learn who you are? Birdie is a muse and a model--by definition, a gauzy projection of someone else's desires. But The Cover Girl is her reckoning, an attempt to reclaim her story and her identity as her own. For fans of Pretty Baby, this is a rock'n'roll novel that resists a nostalgic lens, an industry takedown that never loses sight of fashion's artistry, and a story about one woman's journey to redemption. Birdie's world might be a rarified one, but her late-in-life liberation is deeply relatable. Immersive, evocative, and profoundly empathetic."
--Emily Layden, author of Once More from the Top

"The Cover Girl by Amy Rossi is the story of Birdie Rhodes, a teenage girl whose life is upended when she is scouted by a modeling agent at just thirteen. This chance encounter changes the trajectory of Birdie's life, but most significantly when she is thrown into the orbit of a thirty-year-old rockstar, who quickly convinces Birdie's parents to make him her guardian. This novel transports the reader to the dizzying worlds of both fashion and music in the 1970s and 80s. But more importantly, it examines the life of a child robbed of her childhood by an industry where girls and their bodies are commodities. For readers who loved Daisy Jones and the Six and My Dark Vanessa, The Cover Girl will be a captivating read."
--T. Greenwood, author of Such a Pretty Girl, The Still Point, and Keeping Lucy