Rowena’s review of Popping the Cherry by Aurelia B. Rowl.

You only get one first time . . .

From driving tests to relationships, Valentina Bell thinks she’s a failure, with a big fat capital F. At this rate, she’s certain she’ll be a virgin for ever. So Lena’s friends plan Operation: Popping the Cherry to help her find the perfect man first time.

Yet somehow disastrous dates with bad-boy musicians and fabulous evenings with secretly in-the-closet guys aren’t quite working out how Lena planned.

Soon Lena’s avoiding Operation: Popping the Cherry to spend time with comforting, aloof Jake, her best friend’s older brother, who doesn’t make her feel self-conscious about still clinging to her V card. But could Jake show Lena that sometimes what you’re looking for most is right by your side?

A FOREVER for the twenty-first century.

When I first read the blurb for this book, it sounded cute and like something I would enjoy. It sounded fun and it started out that way but the deeper I got into the story, the more disturbed I was.

After our main character Lena is dumped by her boyfriend for not putting out, her friends stage an intervention. An intervention to help Lena lose her virginity. That would be fine and dandy if Lena was anxious to just be rid of it and on one hand she was but on the other (and more important) hand, Lena didn’t want to lose her virginity the way that her friends wanted her to. She was kind of just swept along on this ridiculous plan and instead of standing up to her friends, she went along with it because that’s what teenagers do. They do whatever their friends tell them to do because they want everyone to shut up about it already.

So Lena starts going out with boys and checking them off her mental list of prospects because at the same time that she’s doing all of this dating, she’s getting closer to her best friend’s brother, Jake. Jake starts showing up when Lena needs her most and he’s the person that Lena finds herself giddy to talk to and see. She’s got the usual teenage hang ups about herself not being hip enough or cool enough for Jake because he’s older than her and he’s out of school but they work those issues out over the course of the book.

My main issue with this book wasn’t that whole Operation: Popping the Cherry mission that Lena’s friends pushed on her but that it took Lena and Jake so long to come out and tell each other how they feel. They could have saved themselves a whole lot of energy if they owned up to how they truly felt all along. All of the second guessing and the giving into Gemma made me want to smack some sense into the both of them but even though they annoyed me a great deal for some of the book, they were also adorable together. I loved that Jake took an active interest in Lena and helped her where he could, all in the hope to just spend some time with her.

I thought the romance between Jake and Lena was cute and I wished they’d get together far sooner than they did but they end up together so it’s all good in the hood. This book was slow in the beginning but overall, I thought Rowl did a great job of stringing this story along. It drove me crazy, it made me sigh so all in all, it was a good read.

Grade: 3 out of 5

This book is available from Carina. You can purchase it here in e-format. This book was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.