I found it thrilling to read a book in which the girl was the oversexed pervert and the boy was completely uninitiated in the ways of the hormonal world. In my mind, Penelope wasn’t so much “dirty” as she was a replica of my seventeen-year-old self. I thought about sex a lot in high school (Who am I kidding? I still think about sex a lot). And I remember the social stigmatization that surrounded girls who didn’t hide their erotic urges behind an aura of false innocence. L