Secrets of the Model Dorm »

Amanda Kerlin first signed to a top international modeling agency at the age of fourteen, and spent most of her teenage years in Paris, Milan, Cape Town, and New York. She has appeared in magazines such as Elle, Glamour, Teen Vogue, and Marie Claire; been featured in advertisements for Abercrombie & Fitch and Naturalizer Shoes; and modeled for John Galliano and DKNY. She is now an art history major and lives with non-model roommates in Manhattan.

Phil Oh graduated from New York University with a degree in history. He now runs a global street fashion website called Street Peeper, occasionally DJs, and spends his time traveling to far-off lands. He met Amanda when he was a guest in the model dorm and now resides in Brooklyn.

Eighteen-year-old Heather Johnston gets the opportunity of her life when she is signed by a premier New York modeling agency. She leaves her small Virginia hometown behind for dreams of Vogue spreads and a luxurious loft overlooking Central Park. Arriving in Manhattan, she is instead given the key to a cramped one-bedroom downtown apartment furnished with bunk beds and IKEA floor samples. Her roommates are exotically beautiful girls boasting a considerable array of vices, including alcohol, cocaine, backstabbing, and fabulously expensive haute couture. Despite their humble quarters, they form an unlikely family. By day they shuttle between castings and shoots, and at night they come to life in the VIP rooms of New York's hottest clubs. While this world is fast-paced and fun, Heather soon questions whether modeling is the fairy tale she imagined it to be. When she gets a part-time job at a prestigious gallery and discovers a passion for art, Heather realizes she might be ready to say good-bye to her dreams of wealth and celebrity and follow a different path.

Fun, campy, and ultimately full of heart, Secrets of the Model Dorm takes readers behind the scenes of the world's most glamorous industry — exposing all of its dirty little secrets and what it really takes to make it — or break it — as a model.

Publishers Weekly

Everything that could be expected in a novel about aspiring models is present: casual sex, drug usage, club hopping, backstabbing, and though Kerlin, an ex-model, and Oh, a DJ and music consultant, are familiar with the lifestyle, they manage to make it a chore to read about. Heather Johnston, newly arrived to Manhattan from the modeling minor league in Miami, is determined to prove to herself and her doubting family that she can succeed as a model. The agency that represents her provides her with the use of a downtown apartment, which she shares with a handful of other aspiring models, including Svetlana, a calculating Russian possessed of a dubious grasp of English. While out one night, Heather meets a dashing French nightclub owner, Robert du Croix, who shows unusual interest in Heather as a person, not merely a body. Svetlana, though, is obsessed with Robert as well. Something akin to drama ensues, but even the frisson of titillation that should accompany a book about desperate models is lost to flat prose and crude stabs at character development. (Jan.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.