The Night She Won Miss America

A Novel

By: Michael Callahan

Narrated by: Daniela Acitelli

Betty Jane Welch reluctantly enters the Miss Delaware contest to make her mother happy and, surprisingly, finds herself to be the judges' choice. Just like that, she's catapulted into the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City. Her pageant-approved escort for the week is the dashing, mercurial Griffin McAllister, and she falls for him hard. But when she unexpectedly wins the crown, she finds she may lose what she wants most: Griff. In order to protect his darkest secret, Griff must run, so Betty recklessly agrees to run, too. With the cops and a scrappy reporter in pursuit, the chase begins, taking them from the carnival of the Boardwalk to the streets of Manhattan and a cliffside mansion in Newport, and it threatens to unravel everything.

©2017 Michael Callahan (P)2017 Dreamscape Media, LLC

Big plot twists, distracting narrator

This book starts off fairly straight forward...a fairy tale story of a local girl who becomes Miss America without trying. Then...the story takes several turns. The narrator really distracted me. I think she had a cold when she was recording this. I was able to make it work by picturing Miss Coco Peru reading this to me as she took her Sudafed.

Could not stop listening

I really enjoyed this book sad the history of the Miss America Pageant. The romance and friends that build the story until the climax

Fun and surprisingly interesting

What made the experience of listening to The Night She Won Miss America the most enjoyable?

The narrator sounds like (but isn't) the character from Miss Congeniality - Miss Rhode Island.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

Strange but (almost) true

Sophomoric

The writing in this book is bad, bad, bad. It sounds/reads like it was written by a teenager who flunked her creative writing class. When I first heard the line, "My Knight in Shining Armor" (or something like that), I should have stopped. The the reader of the book was terrible at pacing the story, made the main character sound like a whining, spoiled, and idiotic brat, and made me groan as she read. I stuck with the book since it is for my book group, but what a perfect waste of time.