Virgin

Starred review from June 30, 2014
Bridget Jones and Carrie Bradshaw, meet your wisecracking, vagina-obsessed match. Sanghani’s debut is a hilarious, irreverent look at smart-alecky, painfully self-conscious, 21-year-old Ellie’s relentless mission to rectify a disastrous first attempt at performing oral sex, get deflowered, find the perfect Brazilian wax, avoid her tradition-bound Greek mother’s nagging, graduate summa cum laude, be a writer, and fit in. She is joined in her booze-fueled misadventures by family friend Paul, newly uncloseted and a fellow virgin, and BFFs Lara, who makes Ellie confront uncomfortable truths about herself, and Emma, Ellie’s cowriter for an advice vlog for other women stumbling along the “path of sexual activity.” “Whatever you’ve felt? We’ve felt worse,” the vloggers promise. Ellie will get it all ridiculously wrong before, predictably, she gets it just right. “I only accepted my virginity after I lost it,” Ellie advises her vlogging audience. “Embrace the STDs... along with the regrets, the disastrous stories, the heartbreak, the pain and the regret.” This story for millennials is a wonderful blend of modern angst with old-fashioned sweetness.

August 1, 2014
Ellie, 21 and in her final year at Uni, is that most dreaded of all things, a virgin and, obviously, an absolutely ancient one at that. There are other aspects of Ellie's personalityher self-deprecating humor, her desire to be a writer, her ability to make her friends laugh while putting her foot in her mouthbut her general cluelessness about men and dating and the unfortunate virginity that results are all that matter. Ellie decides she must once and for all shed her V card but also that other v-word. All things pubic and terrifically descriptive oral sex tutorials occupy much of Ellie's time and Sanghani's pages, for Ellie is walked in on in almost every embarrassing situation in which one could be. When Ellie comes to the inevitable conclusion that losing her virginity doesn't change her personal value or the most important parts of her, she is a much more enjoyable and believable narrator. With its title and two different covers, journalist Sanghani's debut novel could raise interest and eyebrows.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)