Snadowsky's candid follow-up to Anatomy of a Boyfriend (2007) takes readers through ambitious pre-med Dominique's second sexual relationship.
Dominique returns home after her freshman year at Tulane still reeling from her breakup with Wes, her first love and first sexual partner. Dom's best friend, Amy, normally content to hook up without getting emotionally involved, is spending the summer in a long-distance relationship with a boy she met at college. While interning at a hospital, Dom meets Guy, a fraternity brother at a local university, and the two soon become involved. What's the difference between a relationship that might be forever and one that's just for the summer? How does sex affect relationships? What's sex like, anyway? The book's answers are frank, though sometimes didactic or expressed clunkily (“I wonder how many more penises I'll have inside me in my lifetime”). In its best moments, the book presents a multiplicity of opinions and stories about sex, intimacy and relationships and lets readers come to their own conclusions. Some options, however, are still off the table: All the main characters are heterosexual, and masturbation is only ever depicted as weird or tragic.
A mixed bag, but the blunt sex talk fills a niche. (Fiction. 14-18)
