New Day co-anchor Alisyn Camerota has taken a page from her real life and turned it into her first novel, to be published in July.
Amanda Wakes Up is about “a bootstrapping young reporter who lands a plum job at a big-time cable news station and finds her ambitions and her love life turned upside down.”
“If there’s one subject I know through and through, it’s the challenges and behind-the-scenes fun of cable news,” said Camerota. “Being able to assign real-life dilemmas to a fictional character was strangely comforting and instructive. I started this book years ago and am grateful that Viking has been on board the whole way for this crazy ride.”
Camerota, who spent 16 years at Fox News before joining CNN in 2015, sets her story at a news channel called FAIR News. From the publisher:
[Amanda] finds her journalistic ideals shredded as she struggles to keep up with the issues in a ratings-crazed madhouse—battling for hair and makeup time, coping with her sexist (but scathingly handsome) co-anchor, Rob, mixing up the headlines with pajama modeling on the street, and showing Benji Diggs, her media maestro boss, that she’s got what it takes. As the news heats up in a hotly contested election season and a wild-card candidate, former Hollywood actor Victor Fluke, appears on the scene, Amanda’s pressure-cooker job gets hotter as her personal life unravels.
