First Book.(The Talk of the Town)(Jenna Bush; 'Ana's Story: A Journey of Hope')

Correction appended.

Jane Friedman, the president and C.E.O. of HarperCollins, got a call from her friend Robert Barnett, the lawyer in Washington, D.C., last January. He said, "Jenna Bush is doing a book," and offered to arrange a meeting. Friedman was curious, if skeptical. "I mean, when Jenna and her sister were young girls we all read the same stories," she said the other day, while blinking suggestively and fiddling with her scarf. HarperCollins had just published "Ana's Story: A Journey of Hope," based on the first daughter's internship with UNICEF, in Latin America--a surprising turn of events, given Jenna's previous image as the girl voted Most Likely to Trip on Prom Night, and known for her boozy run-ins with law enforcement. "From what I gather, she's a very facile writer," Friedman added.

Do not be put off by the fact that "Ana's Story" has a hundred and two chapters. Some are only forty or fifty words long, and the entire book can be read in the course of a day's commute. The subject matter is grim and raw, and unlikely to please Jenna's Gammie, Barbara Bush, any more than the twins' standup routine at the Republican National Convention, in 2004. Ana (a pseudonym) is an H.I.V.-infected teen who inherited the condition from her mother, was repeatedly molested by her grandmother's boyfriend, and has unprotected sex--once--with another H.I.V.-infected teen and becomes pregnant.

The book has a spare, verging-on-hardboiled prose style (" 'How did your parents die?' Ana asked. 'They were sick," Berto said. 'Mine, too.' "), and suggests that Jenna may yet have a future following Margaret Truman and Susan Ford into the mystery-novel genre. She has a weakness for dubious ethnic analogies: "His eyes were wild, like those of the pumas that lived in the jungles," and "A nurse wrapped Beatriz in a blanket--like a burrito." Still, as Nils Kastberg, UNICEF's regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean, and Jenna's old boss, said, "It's a million times better than the many memorandums that we write."

The New York launch party took place last week at UNICEF House, on East Forty-fourth Street, and as Laura and the twins arrived paparazzi began calling for Barbara--the brunette, the Yale graduate--to turn and smile. "Jenna's the author," someone finally ...