Review: Girl On The Net: How A Bad Girl Fell In Love
Note: this is based upon an advance review copy of the book. The final version may have changes… like page numbers… and a cover… There’s also exciting book launch stuff over at GOTN’s website 🙂 Enjoy.
To say I’ve been anticipating this book would be an understatement; as in I literally, upon meeting the author at Eroticon last year, asked her about when she was going to do a sequel to “My Not-So Shameful Sex Secrets“. The answer was about nine months and the result of which is a rather different beast to the first book.
That’s kind of to be expected seeing as book 1 (as I shall call it) covers everything from childhood to somewhere in the twenties, it’s kind of inevitable that book 2 will have rather different material to work with. I would be tempted to say it feels like it lacks direction on occasion, but that doesn’t do justice to the excellent job it does of painting a picture of a life, a relationship and a partner that is so well drawn through the pages of this book I feel like I know him without ever having met him.
One thing that book 2 does is focus less on sex, but what it loses in sexy fin times it makes up for in a gut-wrenching depiction of life in a modern anxiety-fuelled career. It is powerful stuff and contains moments that took me back to a very unhappy phase in my life and left me I had to take a moment before carrying on. But sweaty palms and trembling fingers aside, its heart-wrenching stuff and, even in the dark places, GOTN’s characteristic humour shines through.
Overall it was funny, heart-warming, gut wrenching, borderline traumatising but in the best possible way. It’s not the lightest of reads, but it doesn’t get lost in the darkness either.
Available from Amazon and signed copies from Coles.