Week 8 Sex in YA Lit: "Anatomy of a Boyfriend" by Daria Snadowsky

Snadowsky, Daria. Delacorte, 2007. 

Pages [272p.][$9.99] ISBN [0385733208]

From Goodreads: "Before this all happened, the closest I'd ever come to getting physical with a guy was playing the board game Operation. Okay, so maybe that sounds pathetic, but it's not like there were any guys at my high school who I cared to share more than three words with, let alone my body.

Then I met Wes, a track star senior from across town. Maybe it was his soulful blue eyes, or maybe my hormones just started raging. Either way, I was hooked. And after a while, he was too. I couldn't believe how intense my feelings became, or the fact that I was seeing—and touching—parts of the body I'd only read about in my Gray's Anatomy textbook. You could say Wes and I experienced a lot of firsts together that spring. It was scary. It was fun. It was love.

And then came the fall."

As a teenager I can recall reading this book (around it's release date, when I was 17 years of age). At the time I really did quite enjoy it as I was on a "Rom-Com kick" (primarily those romantic comedies written in Simon & Schuster's Simon Pulse Romantic Comedies imprint). That being said, reading it some 5 years later I must admit that I didn't enjoy it quite as much as I did the first time around (for a number of different reasons, one being that I can no longer relate to the high school-aged characters like I once could, another that I have read so many books of this nature since then that I can't help but compare them, and so forth). My personal opinions of the novel aside, I do appreciate the book quite a bit, namely due to it being such an instrumental book in the history of YA- introducing sex to young readers. 

At the time that I read this book I knew very little about the realm of sex, aside from what I had learned in school during sex ed. classes. Therefore, this book taught me a number of things, perhaps more than any of those classes did, for instance, not only about safe sex practices (Snadowsky makes explicit mention of what form of birth control is being used, and discusses those options which aren't being used, such as diaphragms), but also about the human body (Snadowsky also doesn't follow the trend in YA of authors "dumbing down" their content, namely in the form of medical jargon, Dom references her GRAY'S ANATOMY a number of times during the text) and sexuality. 

That being said, as we made mention of last class during our graphic novel discussion I know that the question as to whether or not you would recommend this book to a YA may come up- some believing that it has questionable content. Personally, I was never monitored/ censored in what I read as a child and teenager and therefore I do not see myself ever posing those limits on someone.