The always-excellent Powell’s blog tips us off to the big literary news of the day: a sneak peek at Jenna’s Bush’s first novel, Ana’s Story: A Journey of Hope.

The 25-year-old has said she based the book on a series of interviews with a 17-year-old, HIV-positive unwed mother she befriended during her stint as a UNICEF volunteer in Latin America last year… The book ends with a lengthy appendix that includes several tips on how teens can protect themselves against AIDS and other STDs, and it includes sentences like this one: “Whether or not you choose to wait until your married or older to become sexually active, give yourself as much time as you need to make a well-thought-out and mature decision.”… In fact, though there’s no ghostwriter listed, we have a hard time imagining she wrote it herself. Not because nothing in her past antics suggested she had a thoughtful, intellectual bent, or because she occasionally uses big words like “dichotomy” or references to the paintings of Gauguin, but because the book is too smooth.

The write-up concludes with a joke about a James Frey-like scandal that could unfold if the contents of Jenna’s dubious story ever prove to be less than truthful (surely her dad raised her better than that!), but I don’t think that’s gonna happen. If Bush’s cronies can convince Americans that John Kerry was a coward, while W was a nationalistic hero, I don’t think they’ll have any trouble conjuring up an AIDS-stricken teen mother from an under-developed nation to vouch for Jenna’s good honor.