Book Review: "Sexaholics" by Pynk

Sexaholics by Pynk
Reviewed by A. Jarrell Hayes

Stories of celebrity sexaholics (people addicted to sex) make for great gossip topics and South Park spoofs. Tiger Woods’ infidelities and voicemail/text foolishness essentially wrote the jokes for many late night comedians for weeks, months even. But sexaholism should be taken seriously, just like any other addiction. There are stories from regular people that have yet to be heard.

In Pynk’s new novel Sexaholics, Pynk takes the reader inside a sexaholic meeting and into the personal lives of four regular women. There’s Miki, a successful hotel executive and mother who prefers an assortment of men, rather than just one; Valencia is a hot mami who can’t get enough of men and women, she’s also Miki’s best friend; Teela enjoys watching other people have sex, even if it’s her man with another woman; and Brandi, the alcoholic middle school teacher who doesn’t sleep with a man more than once and often moonlights as a hooker.

The four women are new members of a Sexaholic Anonymous (SA) program, and the book starts off with them in their first meeting. After the characters relate what drove them to join the SA group, they return to their regular lives. Miki, Valencia, and Teela all have significant others waiting for them at home, but their partners aren’t committed to helping the women combat with their sex addiction. But, then again, how many men would?

The scenes after the SA meeting is of the women sexing it up – and the scenes are hot and steamy. The book is full of twosomes, sexy threesomes, and wild more-somes. Throughout much of the book it doesn’t appear that any of the women are trying to curb their lustful ways – but going from sexaholic to nun overnight is unrealistic and makes for poor erotic literature.

Like with many addicts, Miki, Valencia, Teela, and Brandi continue along on their lustful paths until something traumatic happens and they realize that their addiction is the cause. Pynk does attempt to explore the mindset of the women and get to the root causes of why the women are addicted to sex, but they come out in monologues that appear out of place with the rest of the novel.

The book falls victim to the pitfall when writing about multiple protagonists: one character and story doesn’t get as developed or as many pages as the other ones. Pynk does break the book into different chapters for the different women, but at the end I felt shortchanged with the lack of exploration into the lives of two of the women.

Pynk’s down-to-earth and fast-paced writing style keeps the story moving and entertaining. The sex scenes are plentiful and titillating. In this book, sex isn’t injected into the story, but the story is injected into sex and the consequences of being a sex addict. In Sexaholics, Pynk delivers on what the audience wants: and that’s sex – lots of it.

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