Swoony Sunday Book Review: "Flirting Lessons"
Jasmine Guillory's first foray into sapphic romance is an utter and infectious delight.
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Warning: Full spoilers for the book follow.
Let me start by saying that I really, really enjoyed this book! Even though I’ve never read anything else by Jasmine Guillory, I enjoyed the effortless and breezy style of her writing, which really does sort of sweep you off your feet and keeps you reading way past your bedtime. When I imagine what the perfect beach read is like, this is the kind of book I’m thinking about.
The book focuses on two women, Avery and Taylor, who couldn’t be more different. Avery is very uptight and filled with anxiety, while Taylor is more carefree and an effortless flirt. After a chance meeting they end up entering an arrangement in which Taylor will give Avery flirting lessons, all while trying to not sleep with her in order to win a bet with her best friend. In the end, of course, they end up falling for each other, though they have to navigate the fraught minefield of emotions before they can really be together.
Throughout Flirting Lessons I found myself identifying most with Avery. This didn’t surprise me a bit, considering the fact that she is one of those people who tends to try to control everything and spends much of her time angsting about every social interaction. Fortunately, Guillory doesn’t beat us over the head with this but, instead, shows us how this is part of who Avery is, even as it’s also the thing that she wants to change the most. Guillory allows us to watch as this tightly-wound young woman finally learns to let her hair down and learn to live a little.
Taylor, on the other hand, is someone who’s largely been floating through life. She’s a lady-killer and a heartbreaker, but she also has dreams and ambitions. Unfortunately for Taylor, when you’re the sexy friend that everyone has either slept with or wants to sleep with, and when you essentially bounce from one job to another, it’s hard to get people to take you seriously. Like Avery, however, she has a chance to grow and change and mature as the novel proceeds.
From the moment the two women meet it’s obvious that there’s chemistry between the two of them. The heat level slowly rises as the flirting lessons become more and more suggestive–going from an author event at a bookstore to queer salsa dancing–until the two are sleeping together. From there it’s not long before feelings come into the equation, and I found the pacing of the book to be one of its greatest strengths. You really feel as if you are spending time with two characters who, as a result of the romance between them, really are becoming better and more functional versions of themselves. This, it seems, is the power of queer love.
While the relationship between Avery and Taylor is obviously the beating heart of the book, I also really appreciated that we got to see an intimate look at queer friendship. Far too often in romance novels we just get one best friend for each of the main characters, which can be a bit reductive. In Flirting Lessons, however, there are many queer friends that appear, and, given the extent to which friendship is so vital for queer women, this feels remarkably true to life. Guillory excels at drawing out some of the complex, and sometimes fraught, dynamics that exist within a group of friends, many of whom have either slept with or dated someone at some point. If you're ever been friends with a group of lesbians, I’m sure you’ll be nodding your head along in recognition of these dynamics.
Likewise, I especially enjoyed the way that the novel grapples with the complicated nature of female friendship. This is particularly true when it comes to Taylor’s bond with her best friend Erica, and one of the key bits of character development involves the former realizing that she’s been kind of a jerk to her friend after her miscarriage. Fortunately for both of them, they know how to communicate, and so their friendship ultimately emerges even stronger than it was before their disagreement. Avery’s relationship with Luke is also nice to see, since it’s very rare for popular fiction to admit that women and men can be just friends without romance getting in the way.
Two other serious notes are worth addressing. The first is the issue of consent and communication when it comes to sex. In addition to being quite well-written, the sex scenes in the book foreground the importance–the necessity, really–of explicit and nuanced consent. This is, apparently, a key feature of many of Guillory’s books, and I for one think it’s fantastic to see. What’s more, just because the characters spend time making sure that the other is comfortable and experiencing pleasure doesn’t mean that things aren’t steamy and deeply erotic. I’m a gay man, and I still found the sex scenes between Avery and Taylor to be deeply arousing. And, as in the best romance, they’re not just there for titillation but are instead key to the characters’ development as both individuals and as a couple.
Just as importantly, I’m also very glad to see some bisexual representation. Avery is very secure in her identity as a bisexual woman, and I was very relieved to see the characters not give her a hard time or try to claim that she is somehow less-than or not queer enough just because she dates both women and men. I also couldn’t help but laugh at the conversation in which Avery and Taylor talk about how purely heterosexual women are walking around the world unsatisfied.
I do have a relatively minor critique. Though I’m partial to dual-POV romances–both as a reader and a writer of romance–the formatting of this one threw me off at times. It would sometimes take me a few moments to realize whose point of view I was reading. To be clear, it’s not that the two characters are indistinguishable; it’s just that the chapters could have been structured more clearly.
That quibble aside, I have to say that I absolutely loved Flirting Lessons. It is yet another of those book club reads that I’m glad was chosen by my queer book club. Given just how much of the short end of the stick Black romance stories–and Black sapphic romance stories in particular–continue to receive at the hands of the publishing industry, I’m glad to see Guillory receiving so much praise. This might be her first sapphic romance, but I do hope that it won’t be her last!