The first time I guiltily flipped through the pages of this book I was a teenager volunteering my time at the local anarchist bookstore. It is full of salacious ideas, but for me the hook came (heh) at the start of Chapter 2 on Desire and Fantasy. "What do lesbian, bisexual, and queer women desire...? We want the fullness of a woman's sex in our hands and our mouths and between our legs. We want to smell her arousal and drink our own juices from her fingers. We want to feel her breasts and taste her nipples... We desire bountiful, luscious, mind-altering moments of pleasure." Followed very soon after by the question, "What do you desire sexually?"

The brilliance of this book is its openness. It offers up a smorgasbord of sexual delights, interests and ideas and encourages the reader to pick, choose and experiment. There is no hard and fast line throughout this book. If there's one hard fact it's that it is very inclusive. Right off the bat there is a big shout out to all different sexual orientations, genders, non-genders, queer, non-queer and everyone in between. That's right, including heterosexuals, bisexuals, everybody! It's for any woman or any body who wants to explore the sexual world by reading an author who is truly passionate about her subject.

Author Felice Newman is one of the founding co-publishers of Cleis Press. I find her writing style both personal and encyclopedic. She is clearly someone who is curious about lots of different kinds of sex and her writing is accessible and easy going. Accompanying Felice's writing are many short accounts from various women that come from an extensive sex survey. This questionnaire was conducted specifically for the Whole Lesbian Sex Book and included about 200 women. Accounts from the survey lend fantastic illustrations and examples for each section of the book.

In the Whole Lesbian Sex Book you will find chapters on Desire and Fantasy, including discovering what it is that turns you on. There's basic but very necessary chapters on sexual anatomy and holistic health. From there on in you have chapters on nearly everything to do with sex including masturbation, finding a partner, clits, tits, oral, vaginal penetration, anal, gender, BDSM, play parties and sex toys. The chapters are very easy to navigate with sub-sections listed below each chapter including page numbers. There's also an index, and this books is really fun to just flip through as well. It's 377 pages of sexy good times.

As I said, I first found this book as a teen. That's not to say that I bought myself a copy of it then. But years later when I started to become more interested in pursuing my own sexuality I thought of this book again. Thankfully I was able to track a copy down and rediscovered how excellent this volume really is. I feel a bit titillated just thinking about all that it holds. It introduced me to some things (like fisting) that I had never heard of before. Also the tone of this book is so kind and welcoming and open without being cheesy at all. It's really a fabulous book for any woman who wants to discover or re-discover her sexuality at any point in life.