Review
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Title: Sex Educated: Letters from a Latter-day Saint therapist to her younger self
Author: Bonnie Young, LMFT
Publisher: BCC Press
Genre: Education: Sexuality
Year Published: 2023
Number of Pages:154
Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 9780998605272
Price: $11.49
Reviewed by Theric Jepson
First the author’s introduction: “In a familiar and accessible format of personalized letters, Sex Educated: Letters from a Latter-day Saint Therapist to Her Younger Self, provides faith-centered and research-backed sexual education to LDS young adults, especially women. Recognizing that the world often portrays sexuality in harmful and inaccurate ways, I hope to help individuals and eventually families develop healthy and true understandings of what sex is and how to establish foundations for fulfilling sexual relationships.”
Good book. I appreciate the angle and the information. I hope it gets a wide audience. Too many minor errors (eg, a missing space; thinking her friends made up something Judy Blume made up; two endnotes at the same location, the second of which reads “Ibid.”; which reminds me that sometimes it likes “Ibid” and other times “Ibid.”—stuff like that), but they don’t get in the way of the book’s value.
The book has twelve letters to her younger self, one each for when aged 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 22, 26, and 28. The conceit is solid. The execution varies at time but since, at it’s core, this is an exercise in practical advice for an external audience and not actual letters sent back in time, the shaky literary choices that would get her eaten alive by an audience neck-deep in time-travel novels hardly matter and I’m ashamed of myself for even bringing them up. I should work on my self-control, I suppose. See the letter to sixteen-year-old Bonnie.
I do love the concept and execution, though, make no mistake. I read things and thought, oh yeah, that would have been helpful at the time, even with the later letters. And she makes a few points later on that I’m not sure I’d had articulated for me before and, frankly, I appreciate that they now have been.
It’s not a long book. You can read it in a day or a week or six months, as you please. Although in the opening letter to the reader, she says, “despite the fact that the first few letters of this book address a child, this is not a children’s book.” I’ve been thinking about that—just when is the right age to leave it lying around for a kid to find? When you’ve read it, I’d be interested in your opinion.