Advanced Sex Tips for Girls: This Time It's Personal

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
Heimel fans have been waiting nearly 20 years for this hilarious sequel to the bestselling Sex Tips for Girls -- but it was well worth the wait. Heimel's witty musings on relationships, sex, and society are the perfect antidote to the blues. Heimel's writing is a skillful mix of humor and advice, including some very practical warnings about love at first sight and tips for overcoming pesky boundary issues.

Heimel is a woman on a mission, determined to prevent hapless ladies from stumbling into the kind of awful relationships she's endured over the years. One of the funniest and most useful chapters, called "Dater Beware," warns women away from "Iffy Men" ("He wears fur"), "Renaissance Men" ("His entitlement expectations are off the chart"), and married men ("Don't be a sap"). Interspersed throughout the book are Heimel's laugh-out-loud reminiscences about her life in the 1960s and '70s, when she discovered the real meaning of free love ("There was always someone to fend off") and, later, being a good wife ("Getting bored to death").

Advanced Sex Tips for Girls, even at its most wildly sarcastic, is full of real self-improvement gems. Heimel assures readers that it's okay to feel lonely when single, even in the face of those smug girls with significant others on their arms, and encourages women to be aggressive and active in their relationships. Most important, she also assures readers that it's perfectly okay to heed the call of peanut M&Ms. (Julie Carr)

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Cynthia Heimel seduced readers with her runaway bestseller Sex Tips for Girls. Now, in this eagerly awaited follow-up, Heimel takes us on a journey toward romantic enlightenment and finds it's not all that far from midtown. Should you date a man who's on Prozac? Why is "single" a buzzword that makes us feel like killing ourselves? What's so funny about a man in a dress? Why was the panty girdle the straw that broke the back of the patriarchy? What if your son gets married on MTV? Is the Backlash over? Why does the theory of evolution dictate that every human must get laid as much as humanly possible? Entertaining, erudite, and always irreverent, Heimel's manifesto is a must-have for the twenty-first-century female.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Twenty years ago, Heimel's Sex Tips for Girls was a hot item for women with bad attitude; her down-and-dirty, irreverent take on male-female relations was a welcome relief, after eons of machismo and years of second-wave feminist struggle. Her sequel, however, is a mixed bag: a little of the old rap on men-to-avoid-like-the-plague (serial killers; "/" guys like plumber/poets and dentist/photographers; "Renaissance" men who think they know more than you do about everything; etc.), a lot about the joys of mindless sex and some ambivalent passages on the joys of singlehood. It's all woven around a loose version of her own personal history, from repressive girdles in the '50s, hippie pleasures of the '60s, feminism in the '70s, dogs in the '90s (it's a DNA thing, as "all cells reach toward dogitude"), culminating in menopause. She doesn't end there, though. With a quick Heimel maneuver, she tacks on three pages of true romance so readers will know she's still into love and men and all that good stuff. While there are some witty moments, especially her menopausal manifesto against wearing "purple drapes," caftans and ponchos, she mainly obsesses about needing sex, needing to flee needy relationships and faking being happy about being alone. It's as if Heimel has turned into a parody of herself: too much "ooh baby" and overexcitement, and readers will begin to think she's just faking it. Still, old fans will buy this sequel, anyway, even if the elastic has lost its snap. Agent, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh. (Feb. 13) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

In this sequel to Sex Tips for Girls, Heimel offers her sardonic advice and wry observations on the difficulties of being a woman during the past 40 years. Thirty-two short chapters cover topics as varied as men's preference for bitchy women, Heimel's delight in discovering feminism, eating out of frustration, and trying testosterone patches. Several chapters deal with her close connection with her many dogs, including the "beagle-ish" Homer, who had "no pedigree at all, just essence of K-9, which, if you ask me, is at least next to godliness." Heimel has a knack for choosing snappy cover titles and for poking fun at male behavior, and here she reveals much of her personal life. Some readers will find her sex tips hilarious and sassy. Others will consider them frivolous, vulgar, and full of anger. A suitable purchase for larger public libraries. Ilse Heidmann, Olympia, WA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews