… was my daughter’s first reaction to the beginning of the virginity novel.

‘They’re doing it on the first page!’ she spluttered.  ‘Is this book going to be in my school?’

Fortunately, her second, third and forth reactions included laughing and giggling, as she kept reading.

Agnes Nieuwenhuizen once said she had a theory that YA writers tended to write a conservative novel at the point that their kids hit adolescence.

I don’t think this book is it.

As a result of the novel, however, I have had to answer a few questions about my own past that I had been planning to fudge for a few years yet.  Fair cop, I guess.