"Into the Night," that song which infamously starts out with "She’s just sixteen years old/leave her alone," came out in 1980 and was a top twenty hit for an obscure singer, Benny Mardones. That this song became a hit says a lot about the time period and attitudes about teenage girls. Of course Mardones wasn’t the only one. The Beatles sang about a girl who was just seventeen, and other singers before them hinted about the youth of the girls they loved. For most of the modern era, girls who’d reached puberty were considered fair game.
Amy Rossi’s debut novel, The Cover Girl, might have been inspired by "Into the Night." Only in The Cover Girl, no one was around to keep the singer and his muse "separated by fools."
Birdie Rhodes was thirteen years old and 5’10” when she was discovered by legendary model agent Harriet Goldman, who took her own with the warning not to make trouble but to tell her if anyone makes her uncomfortable. Two years later, a 30-year-old rock star picks her to be his cover model… and his girlfriend. Birdie’s parents, blinded by fame and narcissism, turn a blind eye and sign guardianship of their daughter over to him. And Birdie moves to LA and goes on tour with the singer, his band, and their hangers-on. When the tour is over, she doesn’t come home.
The Cover Girl is told from Birdie’s first-person point-of-view in the 1970s and 80s and again in 2018, when she’s invited to a gala celebrating Harriet’s fifty years in the business. Most of the story is told rather than shown, with an occasional scene breaking up pages and pages of description and narration. The result is that the reader feels as detached from Birdie’s life as Birdie is from her own abuse.
The novel is tough to read—not because it’s graphic, which it is not. But Birdie is so eager to be seen and to please, and while she acknowledges this, it isn’t clear where this need comes from. Her mother seems narcissistic, but we spend so little time with her, we can't tell how much that affected Birdie. The relationship with the rock star dominates everything, informing Birdie’s lifestyle and career choices. While Birdie also tells the reader about fashion shoots, designers, and some travel, she never reaches the heights she might have reached, had she not fallen in with the rock star and his hedonistic lifestyle. When the relationship is no longer the center of her life, the rest of the book becomes episodic.
In 2018, Birdie still doesn’t seem to have come to terms with the relationship. She’s wedded to the idea that she was capable of making sound decisions at 15, and that the relationship was consensual. While the thread that ties the past and present together is the gala and the question of why Birdie and Harriet no longer speak, Harriet doesn’t appear often enough in the book for readers to care about that falling out, or what will happen when they meet again.
I didn’t love the book—I wanted more showing and less telling—but I rooted hard for Birdie. It was painful that there wasn’t one person in her life willing to take action to get her away from a predator.
Maybe times aren’t that different after all.
Thanks to Kaye Publicity for the book in exchange for an honest review.
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