NEW YORK — In a playful interview, Laura and Jenna Bush acted more like Hollywood stars than Beltway insiders: They sat down in a Midtown hotel suite, junket-style, to chat about their new children's book, "Read All About It!" (HarperCollins Children's Books).

But this pair have known each other for a lot longer than a couple of actors thrown together on a movie set. Laura Bush, wearing a first-lady-friendly blazer, and daughter Jenna, in trendy chandelier earrings, completed each other's sentences and gently ribbed each other as they talked about their collaboration. It's about a mischievous second-grader, Tyrone Brown, who thinks he's too cool for the library.

"Jenna's slightly Tyrone-ish," said Laura Bush, a first-time author who was a school librarian and teacher in Texas.

"We realized in writing that actually SHE is the Tyrone, because we'd get done and then she'd sort of spring up and go do something," countered Jenna, 26. "Tyrone may have a little bit of ADD," she said jokingly.

Jenna already has one book under her belt, last year's nonfiction title "Ana's Story," about a teenage single mother living in Panama with HIV, now out in paperback.

The Bushes' nine-city "Read" tour began in March with a stint on the "Today" show and ended just nine days before Jenna's Oscar de la Renta-clad wedding to Henry Hager, a University of Virginia MBA student, in front of 200 guests at the Bush family's ranch in Crawford, Texas. During the interview, wedding questions were off-limits, though some details were on display: Jenna alternately twirled and hid her sizable engagement ring.

But the pair did chat about the childhood reading habits of Jenna and her twin sister, Barbara.

Jenna liked Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are." "I just wanted to put on that costume and have those horns and run around," she recalls.

She also dreamed of diving into a milk bottle, as Mickey did in Sendak's "In the Night Kitchen."

"He's naked, though. He didn't have any clothes on," her mother reminded her.

"Well, I wanted to be naked," Jenna said.

Dad — President Bush — liked to read to the twins when they were little. " 'Hop on Pop' they took literally and jumped on their daddy when he read it to them," Laura Bush said.

"Which was a lot of fun," said Jenna, giggling.

As for another writing project, a memoir, Laura Bush said she has thought about it.

"We'll see if I can reconstruct the last eight years," she said. "I didn't keep a diary, which is really too bad."