A wry, tender novel of sexual and intellectual awakening. Something made her risk a look at the reader, who took a sip of black coffee. And another. She turned the pages. She pursed her lips. Flannery abandoned her breakfast and watched the woman drink her coffee. It wasn't that she wanted the coffee herself. That wasn't it. Rather, she wanted to be the coffee: she envied the dark drink its chance to taste those lips.
In a steam-filled diner in a college town, Flannery Jansen catches sight of something more beautiful than she's ever seen: a graduate student, reading. Flannery, a seventeen-year-old, new to everything around her, college, the East Coast, bodies of literature, and the sexual flurries of student life, is shocked by her own desire to follow this beauty wherever it takes her. By chance, she finds herself enrolled in a class taught by the remote, brilliant older woman; intimidated at first, she gradually becomes Anne Arden's student outside class as well. Whatever the subject, Baudelaire, lipstick colors, Flannery proves an eager pupil, until one day she learns more about Anne than she ever wanted to know.
"With an admirable respect for the importance of youthful passion, Sylvia Brownrigg spins out this modern version of the age-old story of first love and sexual initiation."
Maria Russo, The New York Times Book Review
"Page by page, Brownrigg captures-in delicious and witty prose-the rapture and humiliation of first love . . . This exquisitely written, bittersweet Valentine of a novel is for any reader who has ever been in a romantic relationship and wants to remember and revel in all the foolish things we do for love."
Publishers Weekly
"The love affair is delightfully rendered and sharply written, tracing the arc of Flannery's discovery not only of erotic pleasures but of intellectual ardor and the wider horizons of adult life in general."
