All American Girl (novel)

All American Girl (novel)

All American Girl is a young adult novel written by Meg Cabot for teenagers. It reached number one in the New York Times best-seller list for children's books in 2002. The story is about a girl named Samantha Madison who lives in Washington, D.C. She is a sophomore outcast at John Adams Preparatory School and has only one friend, Catherine. Sam is a huge fan of Gwen Stefani and often laments that she is not more like Gwen. Unlike Meg Cabot’s Mia Thermopolis in the The Princess Diaries, Sam is against popular culture and dyes her entire wardrobe black because she is “mourning for her generation.” She often feels inferior because her older sister, Lucy, is a cheerleader, and therefore one of the most popular girls in school, and her younger sister, Rebecca, is so intelligent that she takes college-level classes at a special school. Sam is very different from her conservative parents - her father works for the World Bank and her mother is an environmental lawyer. Sam also believes she is in love with Lucy’s boyfriend Jack. Jack is the complete social opposite of big sister Lucy, having an artistic yet rebellious attitude to life claiming that teenagers need to fight the system. Sam's life is turned upside-down when she saves the U.S. President from a bullet, by jumping on the back of a would-be assassin.

A sequel titled, Ready or Not was released in 2005. Meg Cabot also wrote a short story, "Another All-American Girl" included in Our White House: Looking In, Looking Out.