Anatomy of a Boyfriend by Daria Snadowsky

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Annie Hall, Barbara Streisand in The Way We Were, and in less refined forms, any character Sarah Jessica Parker has ever or will ever play have perpetuated what Gawker.com calls the fetishization of the "neurotic hottie." The IQs of female heroines in popular literature and film have been on the decline ever since. Youth heroines are never ever exempt from this smart-dumb-girl paradox. Rory Gilmore and Cady Heron never would've snagged their respective hotties unless they dropped a few books or failed a few calculus quizzes in the process.

Such is the case of Daria Snadowsky's puzzled heroine in "Anatomy of a Boyfriend." The novel operates [pun very much intended] on the notion that smart teenage girls are simply mystified by the opposite sex. They seem competent in every other area-yet when it comes to love, they are lost and in search of clearly written directives they might find in textbooks. As the tagline to the novel aptly puts it, "If only he came with instructions!"

Dominique Baylor is a normal high school senior, and is just as smart as any ditzy girl should be. She loves science and "Gray's Anatomy"-the actual anatomy encyclopedia, not the prime time soap opera about implausibly attractive medical doctors. Though Dominique excels in science, she has, in her wallowy teenage world, failed as a lover. In fact, Dominique is forced to struggle with her unenviable position as a 17-year-old boyfriendless virgin, emphasized by her best friend, licentious aspiring artist Amy who constantly pokes fun at Dom's sexual inexperience.

Everything changes when Dom falls, literally, flat on her face, like any self-respecting smart neurotic hottie would, in front of Wesley Gershwin, "blue-eyed boy" and track star hottie. While she cleans herself off after falling face first in front of a porta potty, he describes his track career-and the two gel immediately. Suddenly orgasms are not just definitions in a textbook.

"All I know from class is that it's a bunch of vaginal contractions and discharge of neuromuscular tensions at the peak of sexual arousal," she states.

Yet Dominique and Wes somehow, in the absence of instructions or know-how outside suburban bus stop legend, discover each other sexually and emotionally. But just as they are beginning to find each other, Dominique finds herself at Tulane while Wesley finds himself thousands of miles away at New York University .

Eventually, things go awry and they find themselves broken up by Christmas-apparently Dominique finds out what a narcissistic "fucking bastard" Wes truly is. Then Amy finds Dominique a good vibrator, and somehow things are right with the world again.

The passage where Dominique, with the furious sex drive of a woman scorned-has an orgasm with the vibrator that her not pregnant best friend gave her is perhaps the most pro-female portion of the novel. It also reiterates some instructional themes of Snadowsky's work. It's absolutely true that you can't find everything in a textbook-boyfriends, vibrators or the fact that you can have some of the best orgasms in the absence of the former thanks to the latter. This is something all neurotic hotties come to learn with time and heartache, just ask Miranda Hobbes from "Sex and the City." Some things are best learned from experience.