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The Princess Hyacinth Books readers club never really caught on that strongly. Every month, the same dozen or so girls... women... whatever we call ourselves these days... would gather on the main floor of the store after closing, arrange ourselves in a vague circle of hard plastic chairs, and try to find some interesting points to make about whichever tome we'd most recently been assigned. But, invariably, half the group had not finished it, a few had not even started it, and the one lass who did get from cover to cover only did so because she was new to the group, and thought that's what she was meant to do.

Wrong. The book club wasn't about books. It was about getting away from the house for an hour or so, to sit and talk with a group of ladies who were fast becoming very good friends - Janet, a 50-something housewife with weary eyes and flyaway hair; Lesley, a college graduate with a vicious sense of humor and a job in computers; Sandra, the no-nonsense grandmother who barely said a word at her first three visits, but then opened up into one of the loveliest people you've ever met... and so on. Every fourth Wednesday, we'd troop into the store at a little after six, take our seats and take out our books... and promptly start talking about something else.

This week was different, though. Patsy, the once-gorgeous, now merely-glamorous woman who'd owned the store for the past quarter-century, and who launched the book club in the first place, had decided (to herself) to shake things up a little, and order up a book that she said might give us something else to talk about, other than our usual chorus of cackles and gossip. If you want to find your own copy, it's called The Body Project... I can't remember the author's name (this all happened a couple of years ago), but it's basically a long and somewhat rambling study of how society's perceptions of young women have changed over the past hundred years.

I'm looking at the notes I made as I read it (I'll confess, I'm a compulsive note-taker), few of which really recommend the book back to me today. But then I come to a paragraph that simply leaps off the page, bold red ink, every letter two lines high. FIRST BLOWJOB - COERCION, NOT CONSENT. WHAT CRAP THIS WOMAN WRITES.

What exactly did she write? I can't remember. But it was very different from anything I experienced, the first time I took a man inside my mouth, and from conversations I'd had with my girlfriends over the years, it was very different for them as well. Now I was wondering - well, we'd talked about almost everything else at the book club, why not oral sex?

The meeting was already underway when I arrived at the store, and I was astonished to discover that, for perhaps the first time in all the years I'd been attending the club, everybody had something to say about the book, opinions that ranged from outright admiration, to sheer hatred. Sandra, especially, had an arsenal of opinions - she was old enough to have lived through the events covered in the early chapters of the book; could remember what it was like to be a gangly teenager in a Midwest steel town at the height of the depression; to be married at 18 to a man twice her age... Tonight, her snorts of derision were probably audible all the way back there as well.

I sat quietly while the others finished up the line of thought they were already pursuing, and then made my play. The book was too negative, too whiney, and far too generalized. "But I think the line that got me was about halfway down page..." whatever page it was.

There was a rustling as the others found the page, a silence as they read down, and then an arched eyebrow from Laura, a prim little thing who bred poodles - for a living or a hobby, I never found out. "What's wrong with that?" "I just thought, again, it was too negative, too generalized. One quote from one bad experience..."

"Probably because ten quotes from ten bad experiences would have been over-stating the obvious."

Patsy stepped in. "Is that you speaking, or have you actually asked around?"

Laura's voice took on a defensive edge. "Well, let's ask around, then.

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