Book Review: Not That Easy

3,5 stars for Not That Easy by Radhika Sanghani

Published on September 24:

Amazon UK

Ellie used to be a virgin, but now she’s a woman with sexual experience. Well, some sexual experience. She also has debt, an unpaid magazine internship, and three flatmates who left her with the single room to match her single status. 

That’s okay. She doesn’t want a boyfriend anyway—she wants several. And if the sex is exciting enough, her ruthless magazine editor boss can exploit her dating life for a column. 

After countless hook-ups, a disastrously fiery encounter with some heat lube, and one orgasm class, Ellie is faced with the sad reality of her sexual ineptitude. But when she starts to witness the emotional wreckage she’s leaving in her wake, Ellie realizes that sex can be hard, and there’s a down side to giving it up too easy. 

Source: goodreads

I was given a review copy through Netgalley with many thanks to the publisher.

Ellie is a twenty-something, Greek girl, living in London, and recently graduated.

Working for an online magazine as an unpaid intern, living in a flat share with her friends and being forced to sleep in the 'single room' due to the lack of a relationship, and only recently having lost her virginity, Ellie feels that her current life is a million miles away from the life she is supposed to lead.

She plans on catching up what she has missed out on and from then on she's on a mission to turn herself into Promiscuous Ellie. Only, is she really as 'slutty' as she claims to be?

This book started off brilliantly, I was rallying up for a read that would get me howling with laughter and on the edge of my seat, routing for Ellie from beginning to end.

But as you can see by my rating, it wasn't as straight forward.

It started off great, filled with humour and brilliant scenarios but after a while that slowed down, Ellie became quite selfish and whiny and I stopped routing for her. I was just waiting for the moment where she'd pull herself together again and was kind of wishing it to move faster to that point.

I'm aware that this sounds all very negative but I still enjoyed more than half of this book. It was just that there was a lot of repetition and had lost most of its humour, which is such a shame. Even before starting to read the book you are given some strong promises; 'Bridget Jones and Carrie Bradshaw, meet your match', it screams on the cover and halfway down the book, I was ready to scream along to it. Though maybe less Carrie Bradshaw and more Samantha Jones, because the one thing this book has plenty of is sex! There's sex on every page. If it's not actual sex, then it's talk about sex, if they're not talking about it they're dreaming about it, and if they're not dreaming about it, they're having some solo fun. 

I'm not a prude but after a while the sex topic got a little bit of a bore. It's like having to eat porridge every morning, after a while that porridge becomes a drag to eat. It's a bad comparison but it's a little how I felt with sex constantly being brought up. Luckily, sex has way more different topics to discuss than a simple bowl or porridge and Radhika Sanghani sure did that.

She tackled a lot of different subject that I think could be tackled more often in books. Easy topics like masturbation, one night stands, slut shaming, and virginity, just as more unusual subjects like getting a condom stuck in you, failing to orgasm, vagina insecurities, and people's pube tending behaviour. All of these, amongst other topics, are discussed in this one book and it makes you wonder why not more authors dare to venture that way.

Ellie is the kind of character I'd love to go have a drink with and listen to all her stories. 

After which I'd never dare show my face in that bar again.