100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed, Melissa P.
You know when you have a book written by a seventeen year old Italian girl it’s going to be a literary revelation if not a little scandalous, at least that’s what you’re hoping for. Instead what you end up with is a diary that follows a young woman’s journey from virgin giving sloppy blowies to her boyfriend to a sexed up Lolita engaging in group sex and BDSM, regrettably instead of being sexy it just ends up reading like a teenaged diary.
Maybe something got lost in translation on this one, but it all just seems like an attempt to be sexy and erotic rather than actually being sexy and erotic. Here’s an example: “He is inside me. With me. He again tears at my clothes, ripping them from my body, exposing my belly and then, farther below, my warmest point. He slowly lays me down on the pavement. His head descends, and his tongue thrusts between my legs.” The sexiest part of that whole little excerpt there is the punctuation placement. She later refers to the smell of her crotch on his face as her ‘humors’. I laughed. At a later part when she is experiencing having sex with a woman she becomes rather introspective with really deep thoughts, “Teach me how to make love with a woman or teach me how to love? Perhaps the two things compensate for each other. . . .” I laughed again.
All of this is written by a woman that considers herself a “terrible narcissist” and also very pointedly told one interviewer that she considered her book pornography and not literature, or even erotica. So at least she’s self aware and like, modest. While you might expect some horrible low point or awful thing to befall our heroine, the worst that happens is some teenaged angst and bad grades. For all the hype around this book, and even sticking it in the erotica section, it’s in actuality quite innocent, the hundred strokes of the brush before bed, are not in fact landing upon her rump, but through her hair, as part of her beauty routine.
