Friday, June 24, 2011

Sex Strike

*Read via ARC from Around The World ARC Tours

This book gets a pretty good 3 gnomes out of 5 gnomes for being an interesting look at high school relationships and a great update of Lysistrata (a Greek play that is also about a sex strike).

The main gist of the story is that the football team and the soccer team have been having a major feud for years.  This feud is causing Lissa, the main character, to feel that her boyfriend loves the feuding more than he does her.  In this high school the feud tends to come first and lately things are escalating and more people are getting hurt.

If you can suspend your disbelief that there would be a feud between two sports teams at the same school that everybody knows about and seems to do nothing, then you will enjoy the book a lot more.  I found it hard to do this though mostly from personal experience.  At my high school nobody really cared all that much about the different sports teams because the players usually played more then one sport and most of the teams never really won all that much either.

Lissa sees this feud as the major problem between her and Randy.  She knows that she is not the only girlfriend of the football/soccer players that is having problems.  So she devises quite a solution to end the strike, kind of a counterstrike where the girls will not have sex or fool around with their boyfriends until the feud ends.

Lissa is written as being a smart girl who wants to take care of her family and seems to genuinely care about people.  The other girls though feel more that a little like caricatures at times or like they are just there to represent a certain point of view about sex or sexuality.  It feels like the male characters are better written, especially Cash, who's one side of the rather uneven love triangle.

The love triangle bothered me because it was extremely easy to see who she should end up with.  One of the guys in this love triangle seems to have no redeeming qualities.  It makes you question Lissa's self esteem and wonder what she sees in a guy who acts like a real jackass most of the time.  

It's great to see the many different kinds of relationships that all of the girls have.  Doing something like this actually lets more of a bond form between the group.  This strike lets them look more at themselves as individuals and think about where their relationships are going.

There are some surprises and the story does take an interesting turn towards the end.  It's great to see Lissa grow up more as the story progresses and realize that maybe she does need to loosen up every now and then.

Overall this is a fun book that's just a bit formulaic at points, you'll know the ending long before it happens but the journey to get there is a good read.

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