Disclaimer: I received a free digital ARC from Penguin in return for an honest review. The views and opinions expressed below are entirely my own.
I would like to applaud Radhika Sanghani for writing a novel that is frank in its discussion of sex, accessible to young readers in similar plights, and TMI in all the right ways.
I would like to. But I can't. Because Radhika Sanghani ends up making virgins and women my age look like superficial, air-headed, sex-crazed robots with no redeemable qualities and no interest in anything other than "THE D." She may have had good intentions, but anyone with half a brain is only going to feel insulted and disgusted by her lack of descriptive narration, forced dialogue, general disregard for fluidity, assemblage of poor continuity, and despicable characterization. I can only assume that she paints Ellie so clueless about sex because she thinks that virgins must be completely innocent about even common sense sexuality, which is super offensive and becomes a disservice as Sanghani has an opportunity to show the world what being an adult virgin means and instead she completely disrespects her own subject.
This isn't a book so much as a literary game of Jenga. You pick at one thing and the entire story falls apart. The only reason I finished this novel was because I feel some sort of duty because I received the book for free and some people enjoy reading my reviews, as well as the fact that I promised a previous reviewer of this novel (who stopped a few chapters in) that I would finish it and tell him if it got better. It didn’t (if this is all you needed to hear, @Ian Wood, feel free to stop reading).
Honestly, I have no idea where to begin because Sanghani has weaved one tangled web of NOPE. I guess I will begin with some general self-disclosure: I am not a virgin, I lost my virginity to a long-term, live-in boyfriend, and I pride myself on being very liberal about women’s issues. AKA Long Live The Sluts; but I also think that women should embrace their virginities and be well-educated BEFORE jumping onto the first phallus that comes their way. I’m going to try my damndest not to turn this into a sex ed lesson *puts bananas away*, but with the shocking amount of misinformation contained in these 294 pages, it’s going to be hard (pun intended).
I don't really know what I expected from this novel. Maybe a literary version of teen "virginity" movies like Sex Drive or American Pie, but with an older and more mature narrator? The characters seem more like they should be teenagers rather than adults and the descriptions are even reminiscent of preteen novels "he was wearing a gray hoodie and he had a flippy, emo fringe and a lip piercing." They act completely childish and judgmental rather than grown ADULTS with a higher education. Shouldn't this be around the time that they begin to reflect on their goals and values in life? Virginity should be the least of this girl's worries.
Ellie is a vapid, immature 21-year-old who doesn't know anything about sex and still wants to have it. She is a fairly flat character who never seems to do anything but try to find some uncaring horndog who won't feel iffy about taking a girl's virginity in a one night stand (trust me, ladies, that's not the kind of guy you want to have sex with, EVER). She seems to have no inner character, passion, or ambition aside from that. From time to time, she tries extremely hard to be funny, but that mostly falls flat.
Maybe it's because I'm a 20-year-old NOT-VIRGIN, but I can not imagine any normal-functioning adult to behave this way. I'm not the poster child for maturity or anything, but are we really supposed to believe this is the only thing in her life that matters? Isn't she in college? Surely she has to be studying something. Why does she even go to the doctor in the first place? There seemed to be some type of "sign-up" indicating she had an interest in a program of some sort. However, none of that is mentioned in the first part of the novel.
Eventually, I did pick up that she wants to be a journalist and she begins writing a blog for virgins (because “no such thing exists” - hello, Scarleteen, TeenSource, I Wanna Know!, Sex Etc., and countless other websites and books written by actual (s)experts). But it begins by showing a very lukewarm, lazy, impassionate entry she enters into a contest for an editing position with her school journal and continues with the fact that she KNOWS nothing about sex. If she is so obsessed with it, you’d think she would have Googled plenty of information and discovered things on her own instead of just whining about how “no one tells you to shave your pubes” or “no one says to use a condom when giving a bj (more on that later).”
I mean, I get it, she receives lots of untrustworthy information from equally-stupid peers and scumbag men. But I’m pretty sure anyone and everyone who has ever been to “the lady doctor” knows that your hymen doesn’t actually break during sex. And the amount of references to this is astounding, which makes me really concerned for the author, considering not once does Ellie Google this and she still believes her hymen is some penetrable forcefield at the end of the novel. And then you find out that she’s been touching herself since a seriously young age, and that most of the shame and guilt for her sexuality was put onto her by her mother (who is one page strict enough about sex to send her to an all-girls boarding school and the next page demanding Ellie find a boyfriend). These things just don’t add up. Someone with raging hormones, in spite of being caught masturbating, is going to be naturally curious and find ways to sate that curiosity. And COME ON, she acts like she is the first girl to ever watch porn. Not self-disclosing here, but Google some statistics - almost everyone watches porn unless they have some sort of feminist diatribe against it (and sometimes even then they still do). It just didn’t add up that she hadn’t done “research” like this much earlier, given aforementioned curiosity.
She has absolutely no respect for herself or any of the guys she involves herself with. She constantly hates on herself and judges others, and suddenly does a 180 several times in expecting people to respect her without ever giving them a reason to and having “soul-baring” epiphanies. Maybe this is un-feminist of me, but I don’t think anyone should be having sex or building formative relationships when he/she has no clue how to treat herself or other people. She whines about how no one wanted to take her virginity because she was not pretty enough or because she had some misadventures in hookups, but honestly every single person is going to have those funny stories they share with their best friend, and she basically does it to herself by not being honest or comfortable enough with the guy she hooks up with to gain experience and by not respecting herself or the guys she encounters. I mean she isn't even willing to have a conversation with guys before acting so desperately horny that it would scare anyone off.
She even says at one point she doesn’t want to lose her virginity to someone who will abandon her. Then maybe don’t have sex with the first person who wants to have sex with you? Look, girl, you are in the 21st century. You are your own woman. Take some responsibility and educate yourself so that you know how to avoid things you don’t want to happen. You are not some helpless sex-robot or fuckdoll that has no autonomy or decision in the matter. And then she turns around and clearly states that she has the goal of doing a walk of shame, as if there is a source of pride in that achievement.
Now, on to something that isn’t horrid characterization. The setting consists of a bunch of buzzwords like "London," "Oxford," "posh bar." Is this supposed to be a sentence in a novel or a tagline to a blog post? Several times, she mentions “the new restaurant” or “that hot new music video” with not even a single descriptor. Rather than building a relatable bridge so that Ellie becomes everywoman and the audience can fit into Ellie’s role easily, which is what I assume she was trying to do, generic statements and no descriptions make this fall super-flat and fail to identify with Ellie as HER OWN WOMAN.
The writing is terrible and the descriptions don’t really give me any feeling at all except extreme uncomfortable nausea. Even the parts that were supposed to be sexy were just...bland and uncommitted. It reminds me of the very first sex scene I wrote back in high school - a lot of “he kissed me passionately. his hands touched everywhere. he kissed me passionately again” and not much else.
The dialogue feels very fake rather than a flowing, natural conversation between the characters. This is also because the characters seemed to be "13 going on 30" caricatures who care more about appearing enlightened and interesting than actually being either of those. Some jokes were okay and I appreciate that how the topic was addressed was frank rather than conservative, and the book was seriously fast-paced so I was able to read it through pretty quickly, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. The fast pace made it feel like everything was so forced rather than naturally flowing, like the characters couldn't just sit or things couldn't just happen at a normal rate - it seemed every time someone spoke, there had to be a change of topic or an action conveyed, like things were brushed off before they were even fully spoken. I just couldn't identify or empathize with Ellie at all.
On top of all of this, it doesn’t look like Virgin was proofread very well and there are plenty of times when a word is used seemingly arbitrarily - I probably threw up everytime she used the word “feminist,” not sure how the term “almost-chod[e] can be described as “onomatopeoic,” and finally, using the term “monosyllabic” several times when the person she is talking to is using SEVERAL SYLLABLES IN FULL SENTENCES that are in no way curt or disinterested.
Next is how Virgin alienates homosexuals with Ellie’s offensive stereotypically attitude. Let me just lay this out in a list so we can cross the bridge quickly and burn it so I never have to think of this again: 1) no one wants to be a Gay Best Friend, 2) not all gay guys have impressive fashion sense, and 3) HIV is not the only STD a gay guy can get, nor is it reserved for “the gays.”
And my final bone to pick with Virgin is a spoiler - although I tread lightly here as it is anticlimactic and expected after seeing how clueless Ellie is, and the fact that a very serious issue is flitted over in a few paragraphs is highly offensive and dangerous to the audience. After Ellie (spoiler) loses her virginity, she finally gets to go into the doctor’s office and have that embarrassing “virgin” status exchanged for a “sexually active” label. This, first off, is juvenile of her, did she think she was going to be lifted on the shoulders of the staff and have a Non-Virgin Parade in her honor?
So she takes this chlamydia test that she keeps harping on about (I bet her mother would be proud), and big shocker - it comes back positive. This because she performed oral on a guy without using a condom. So what does she do? Naturally, she lets him know and takes her treatment seriously, right? Wrong. She spends all of one solitary page being surprised before concluding that “After twenty-one years of surviving virginity, chlamydia didn’t really seem like a big deal.” NOT A BIG DEAL? Let me explain something to you - chlamydia can cause painful inflammation and fertility problems if untreated and it is the #1 most transmitted sexual disease, meaning that it is a very real and prominent threat. She could have gotten a very difficult-to-treat disease or one that wasn’t curable at all. Using a serious disease as an afterthought just made the novel come full circle back into the trash that it already was. Regardless of whether or not you are in a committed monogamous relationship or casually sleeping your way through your college years, there is no excuse not to take STDS/STIS seriously and to protect yourself to the best of your ability. And there’s no justification to taking it THIS lightly - because setting an example of being blase about your own health isn’t cute or funny - it’s unethical.
Virgin is pure unadulterated filth that I believe may break the cardinal rule of writing (doing harm to your reader), and rather than setting up a 21st century novelization of feminism and the issue of young women’s budding sexuality, Virgin itself becomes an example of just how uninformed people can be and how dangerous lack of knowledge can be to readers. There were opportunities here - to point out the issue of double standards, to discuss the multitude of healthy sexual possibilities, to address the implications and responsibilities of sexuality, to depict a common modern problem, to unveil the scientific evidence against hookup culture and possibly even make an argument against that evidence (or not). But instead we got Virgin.
Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆ (0/5 WOULD NOT BANG)*
*This rating differs from my Goodreads review because Goodreads will not allow you to give zero stars.
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