POLYANDRESS

In this romance, a middle-aged woman is wary of commitment to a younger man.

Amara Glazer is a 44-year-old Jewish woman living in Chicago, working as a dog groomer after a stint as an international development consultant in Malawi. She’s also in the middle of a yearslong romantic-relationship drought. Daler Singh is a 24-year-old Tanzanian-born Sikh and international pop star whose kohl-rimmed eyes, lithe physique, and suggestive hit “Don’t Hustle Me” make him People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive. He and Amara have little in common, aside from a time long ago in a Kenyan resort, when Amara spent a week having sex with the teenage Daler. They meet again in the presentwhen Amara takes a six-month gig in Los Angeles as a live-in dog trainer to a Los Angeles Lakers player, and Daler arrives in the city on tour. They instantly fall into bed, and Daler soon proposes to Amara, declaring that she’s the only woman who ever satisfied him. Amara is equally avid, but bitter experience with men makes her wonder how realistic his ardor is. Michaels’ ambivalent novel veers between explicit sexuality and a cagey critique of it as a foundation for long-term happiness. Amara is also hard-nosed about the pitfalls of meshing their lifestyles, domestic arrangements, and bank accounts: “If you’re prepared to support me financially, I want proof you can do that if you want me to stop working and be with you,” she tells Daler. Dog training also pervades the book in the many scenes of Amara coaching and primping canines and in her ethos of integrity and responsibility. As such, the novel sometimes feels more like a lively, tough-talking self-help guide than a romance. For the most part, Amara is depicted as an appealing, quirky character, holding forth endlessly on such subjects as dogs, sex, African history, and musician Freddie Mercury. However, her troubling behavior in the section set in the past, when she’s 24, goes largely unexamined. Daler, who’s only 14 at the time, is depicted as instigating the sexual interaction, which is portrayed as an unproblematic liaison that both characters find blissful and edifying.

A flawed book that’s vibrant, didactic, and problematic, by turns.