New Adult Fiction: At It's Best (Or...New Adult Fiction: Theater Nerd Edition)

New Adult Fiction has been sweeping away readers who span from preteen girls hungry for an expression of the sexual desires they are beginning to feel to middle aged women hungry to re-experience the time in their lives when sex was new and exciting, to us: the twenty-somethings about whom this fiction is written.

We are a very critical audience, for the most part.

Especially us theater girls.  Who will devour anything worth carrying in our beach bag (Twilight or it's near predecessor Fifty Shades of Grey), but are quick to denounce either as being as meaningless as fluff/porn to as harmful as retrograde anti-feminism.  And while those Hunger Games books certainly had their fierce female warrior, half of us were unhappy with the ending and the other half of us wondered why we had to invest in another love triangle in the first place.  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series also features a kick-ass, dysfunctional heroine, but wasn't really written to fit into this genre, even though it does, and is also an import from Sweden so of course it's more liberal in its thinking.  The series even bears the original title Men Who Hate Women, but that title wouldn't fly with US publishers. 

If you are looking for something fun, something that makes you smile the whole way through, that fits perfectly within the new "New Adult Fiction" genre but also takes time to wink at you and drops it down for something real:  then you need to run to the Kindle store to pick up Cora Carmack's LOSING IT.

The heroine, Bliss Edwards (a THEATER MAJOR in a liberal arts program) doesn't bear the "Mary Sue" quality that, say, Anastasia Steele of Fifty Shades bears.  No, she knows that she is attractive, but has never really taken the opportunity to have sex.  She feels weird for still being a virgin at twenty-two.  She doesn't want to jump into bed with someone random, but she would like to get down with someone.  And so, sometimes she gets in over her head, sometimes her emotions get blurry, sometimes her plans go awry and she can't control everything.

A jet-setting billionaire doesn't come to her rescue.  Neither does a vampire, werewolf, fellow warrior, infamous journalist, or anyone else for that matter.  Bliss does meet a guy, since this burgeoning genre means including some form of romance, and it is the kind of guy she's been looking for:  the kind of guy she'd be more than happy to do the deed with, among other things.  Things get messy, because if she just met the guy and things worked out wonderfully the first time (no pun intended) then we wouldn't have our book, or our genre either.  She makes a decision or two along the way, and we get our (SPOILER ALERT) happy ending.

This is the thing I like the best about the book:  Bliss is making decisions.  She's not helpless, she's not clueless, and she doesn't play wilting flower.  She's not invulnerable, either.  This is a perfectly written, human character.  She has goals beyond landing the man of her dreams, and she attains some of them too.  In the end, the book is a romance, so let's not get too critical about the overall importance of her paramour(s).

And, okay, there is also still a love triangle.  But, come on guys, even Shakespeare used those.

Oh, yeah.  Theater majors will love the jokes and winks that we get.  As you're reading, if you find that all of this shit stuff didn't happen to someone in your undergrad liberal arts department, then I want to know where the hell heck you went.