Sticky Fingers by Niki Burnham

I'm using the book's cover flap summary for a specific reason. Read on to find out why.

Bulletproof, that's how Jenna Kassarian sees herself. It's all about control: As long as she works hard, nothing can hurt her. So Jenna constantly pushes — for perfect grades, the ideal boyfriend, the best, best friend.

The only problem is, she doesn't know if she can stop. If she relaxes even for a second, she's afraid she'll lose control completely.

Then Jenna decides it's now or never. She goes to a party and has one drink. But one drink is all it takes for her perfect facade to shatter. Suddenly she realizes straight A's can't protect you in the real world.

From Goodreads

Does it say in there anywhere that the whole book will be about Jenna's debate over whether or not to have sex with her boyfriend? Honestly that's what the whole book was about. While Jenna's debate over her virgin status was wrapped up in a larger struggle to do things more for herself than others, the dominant subject was sex. While I think it can be a basic COMPONENT of a storyline, I think, in this case, it was taken a bit too far.

While I felt that the subject matter didn't correspond to the description, I will say that I was intrigued by the diversity represented by the characters. They were also fairly well-developed characters. I feel I would like to have known more about their backgrounds. I got the basic gist of who was what (brain, jock, edgy, hip, etc) but I think given some of the very serious activities taking place that a little perspective would be in order.

Finally, I just have one thing that really irked me. While I completely support an author's right to voice their opinion, I think the manner used in this book was so obvious that its purpose was defeated. Next time try to make the advice more helpful than detrimental & less obvious. I'm sure there are plenty of teens who could benefit from parts of the advice, but they'd never get to read it if the advice is written like a manual on circumventing parents & consequences. Subtly is almost never overrated.

While this was a decent book in the end, I struggled with it. I'm sure it's just my personal feelings, but it just sat funny with me. Give it a go, but don't say I didn't warn you.