Review Tuesday: The Virgin Club -- #SocialMedia #RomCom #ReviewTuesday

The Virgin Club by Kayley Wood

Emma Parker has learned the hard truth through experience: what goes up must come down. When things are going well, she can’t help expecting the next disaster. Perhaps the most vivid example of this maxim’s truth is the way she fell flat on her face and broke her nose at her very first job interview out of college. As she bled copiously all over the HR manager’s desk, an unseen Samaritan helped her get to Emergency, but the damage was done. She didn’t dare return to the scene of her gory humiliation.

Of course she got another job, a marketing position at a smaller firm which would have been pretty enjoyable if not for her slave-driver boss. She has her own apartment, independence and two of the best friends a girl could ever want, Jada and Lauren. Now the only thing she really lacks is a boyfriend. At university, she and her friends made a pact not to surrender their virginity until they’d graduated. Now that the three have launched their careers, though, her besties have both found partners and are deeply in love. All of a sudden, Emma’s virginity seems more of a burden than a blessing, so she makes a vow to lose it by her twenty fourth birthday – a few weeks away.

Easy, right? Except that this was a very public vow; Emma is an aspiring author and has been blogging about her life for a while. Her post about the virginity challenge goes viral and Emma’s life becomes a lot more complicated. Two hot guys at work both appear to be candidates for her first plunge into love. Which one is the right man for her? Which one should she trust?

Kayley Wood’s The Virgin Club is a sweet, witty novel about love, friendship, Hagen Das and appletinis. When I had Kayley as a guest on my blog, her bio said she’d been trying to create a Bridget Jones type of character, updated to the twenty first century. She has succeeded brilliantly. Emma is funny, desperate, creative and goofy by turns. She lurches from one crisis to another, always with the best intentions. Her schemes and plots almost always backfire, through no fault of her own. Emma’s the real deal, but some of the people around her are deceptive, conniving low-lifes who are more than ready to throw her under the bus. I won’t tell you who, though – part of the fun of this book is that you never really know, until the very end, just who are the good guys and who are the schmucks.

My only criticism of this book involves the formatting. Quite a bit of the story is told via Internet chats and sequences of Twitter Direct Messages. (As I said – definitely twenty first century!) I found it difficult at times to figure out who was “speaking” because the different sentences seemed to run together. It would have helped to have people’s names (rather than just their initials) precede each message, and to have blank lines between them.

Or maybe I’m just showing my age! Perhaps a reader closer to being a digital native would not have any trouble sorting out these parts.

I really enjoyed reading The Virgin Club and I recommend it highly if you’re looking for well-written but light-hearted entertainment.