Popping The Cherry (Facing the Music, #1)

by Aurelia B. Rowl

[Leah]

When I was offered the chance to be part of Auerlia B Rowl’s blog tour for novel Popping The Cherry, I was really looking forward to reading the novel. I love young adult/new adult books and it’s been a while since I’ve read a YA/NA novel. I liked the idea of Valentina AKA Lena popping her cherry, and I though it would be like Cora Carmack’s fabulous novel Losing It. But, it wasn’t. It wasn’t like Losing It at all, and unfortunately I didn’t enjoy the novel as much as I wanted to, mostly because I wasn’t sure the book knew what it wanted to be.

Popping The Cherry is touted as a Forever for the 21st Century, but I haven’t actually read Forever so I’m not 100% sure it is. I suspect it is not, though. I can see the similarities from reading both synopses, but they’re really not the same at all. I wanted a fun, cheery read about losing your virginity, I didn’t want a read that showed that peer pressure is alive and kicking and people will happily go along with it for no reason whatsoever. I felt the whole virginity intervention to be slightly insulting, and I was disappointed that Lena didn’t tell her so-called friends that it was a stupid idea and she wasn’t going to do it. Being a virgin isn’t something to be embarrassed about, and it made me so sad that Lena’s friends were so adamant she had to pop her cherry ASAP. Maybe that was meant to be the point, that Lena was a sheep and that being a sheep is wrong, but I don’t know.

Another thing that I found utterly bizarre is there are a series of incidents that Lena ends up being part of – things that I found to be so, so farfetched. How on Earth can one person find themselves stranded in the middle of the road and chased by two men, potentially drowning in a swimming pool, and then getting into a sticky situation with a boy. I could have maybe accepted one of the situations, but three just made the book feel untenable. Lena just found herself all the time in these unimaginable situations, she was a magnet and it felt as if the novel was trying to be a YA/Crime hybrid novel and that’s not what the synopsis promised and it just made the plot seem disjointed with all of these events occurring.

What I did really love about the novel, though, was the friendship between Lena and Jake. Jake was an amazing character and I wished Lena had been a bit more mature when it came to Jake because there were times their little age gap seemed like such a bigger one. I could’ve read a whole novel dedicated to just Jake, he was a brilliant character and he made the book for me. I was hoping for such high things of Popping The Cherry and I was so disappointed that it didn’t really work for me, because I really wanted it to. I’d definitely read one of Aurelia’s books again, but Popping The Cherry just tried too hard to do too much, and I was disappointed that it spent more time on the crime-y aspect than it did on Lena’s quest to lose her virginity, something I didn’t really agree with in the first place, if only for the whole peer pressure aspect, when really it should have done the opposite, showing that despite Lena’s pressure, she would stand up to her friends. Sadly not.