The Blonde
What if Marilyn Monroe had been a Soviet spy sent to seduce JFK and to coax out his secrets? Here the blonde bombshell is initially recruited as a teenager and set on the road to stardom until payment comes due at the height of the Cold War in 1959. Then, lured further by the promise of meeting the father she never knew, Marilyn sets out to snare the charismatic senator from Massachusetts, letting nature, along with her lush body, take its course. What she doesn’t bank on is falling in love. In Godbersen’s telling, Marilyn is street smart under her veneer of naïveté (with an agent assigned to her in Hoover’s FBI); Kennedy is a reckless womanizer reined in by brother Bobby; and both JFK and MM find their affair turning unexpectedly emotional. In her adult-fiction debut, YA author Godbersen puts her own spin on history, as a love story with a twist turns thriller. More fodder for the insatiably curious followers of both these larger-than-life main characters. --Michele Leber