Customer Reviews

One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed (Five Star Paperback)

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-- but finding something else.

This brief book by "Melissa P," supposedly the cover model as well as author, takes the form of a diary. It's about a girl, just fifteen as the book opens, who delights in the pleasures of her woman's body. She is determined to find a dramatic, romantic love, the kind that makes "her heart melt ... [and her] icy stalactites shatter and plunge into a river of passion and beauty."

In other words, she has a teenager's overheated physical drive but no realistic direction. The first can be a wonderful thing, if it has a rewarding outlet, but that would be outlet of a kind she can't imagine or even recognize at first. That leads to a promiscuity without real satisfaction, and a slow spiral away from her original happiness in herself.

The ending is happy, though - a relationship that may lack in heat, but is filled with warmth. The low point of the book never gets destructively low, teen angst and bad grades at worst. And for all its physicality, there's nearly no real erotic content. (The title's "hundred strokes" are quite innocent.) As a novel, it's brief and bland, but parents of teenage girls are likely to find it very uncomfortable.

//wiredweird

100 HUNDRED STROKES OF THE BRUSH BEFORE BED is an autographical novel about a 15-year old Sicilian girl looking for love and self-discovery through sexual exploration. An international sensation when it was originally published in Italian, this English translation is very literal and as a result uses stilted English (the male anatomy is referred to as a lance) that may strike some as awkward or perhaps poetic.

Though I suspect that 100 STROKES OF THE BRUSH BEFORE BED is not intentionally a cautionary tale, this short novel reads like the classic teen diary, but differs from the average girl's experiences because the author, the mysteriously credited Melissa P., is dangerously adventurous.

A middle class Southern Italian teenage girl who eagerly finds herself in a variety of sexual relationships from first time quickies to orgies to casual meetings with 30-something men she meets on-line, the narrator is a complicated character. Some critics have detected an adult perspective in her observations and as a result many have questioned whether Melissa P. is in fact as young as her publishers claim her to be.

Though the author is obviously precocious, intelligent and generally speaking a very good writer, I do believe 100 HUNDRED STROKES OF THE BRUSH BEFORE BED was written and edited from a teenager's journal. There is a hopeful, optimistic and ultimately disappointed voice here that can only result from a teenage girl trying to find her way in a very seedy, adult world.

Any parent of a young girl would be horrified to read this book because it reveals the scary thoughts of a little girl who places herself in confidence-shattering situations. Still I hope that if I had a teenage daughter I would encourage her to read 100 HUNDRED STROKES OF THE BRUSH BEFORE BED because it carefully details the emotional danger young girls regularly find themselves in when they pretend to be adults.

Though most girls don't go as far as Melissa P. did, many teenagers flirt with danger in a similar way. Reading this novel would hopefully encourage them to give their actions and their inevitable repercussions a second thought.

- Regina McMenamin

this book is really good. one of the few books i would read again. erotic but not raunchy. sex, characters, and feelings are beautifully described.

A shocking, teenage memoir of a Sicilian girl's sexual awakening. The conflict between her Catholicism and strict mores of her traditional parents and her relentless emotional desires turns her search for love into a quest for sex and sexual adventure. A little stilted in translation it is nevertheless a fascinating, if not harrowing (brief) read.